


Play the Flickering Flames

by mugwort_and_myrrh



Series: The Fray Will Well Become Me [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. References, Alternate Universe, Angst, Blood and Violence, Crossdressing, Emotional Constipation, Gen, Magic, Non-Serum Steve Rogers, Parent Loki (Marvel), Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shapeshifting, sorcery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-04-14 06:21:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 52,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14129958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mugwort_and_myrrh/pseuds/mugwort_and_myrrh
Summary: “He's called Loki. He's not from around here,” Fury says, and it’s not until Steve gets back to the apartment and finds the briefing package someone’s left on the kitchen counter—Loki of Asgard. There’s a rough profile based on what they know so far: a sorcerer, a trickster, alien. Immortal. And there are a couple photos ripped from security footage, Loki standing over the bodies of SHIELD personnel with some kinda energy weapon in his hand. Tall, pale, dark hair slicked back. Slender, haughty features, like a hawk. Familiar Goddamn features.He’s Ulfadhir. He’s Ulfadhir, he’s Steve’s fucking father.Steve Rogers—iceborn, wolfkin, sorcerer and spy and part-time Captain America—has made it out of the ice, made it home. And okay, no one he loves is alive and intact to tell of it, and there’s a paramilitary spy agency watching his every move, and everything is a nightmarish shitshow but that’s just business as usual, really, and he’s got a handle on it and then—And then his father steals the Tesseract and turns a classified SHIELD installation into a sink hole. And then the shit hits the fan.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome into arc three, fam! Thank you for your patience with the hiatus—we’re back, with more Magic Pixie Dream Steve, 21st century shenanigans, and the long-awaited reunion with Loki. Complete work, posting weekly (Wed/Thursday ish, depending on your timezone and my work roster).
> 
> (Anyone who has not yet read arcs one and two: I recommend you start there. This is not your grandmother’s Steve Rogers, and there’s a Hell of a lot of backstory that you’ll probably need to make sense of this.)
> 
> Thanks again to my alpha and beta readers: Chantelle, Liz, Jacqui and Julie. Love all your faces.

On his third day awake and walkin’ around in the 21st century, SHIELD finally lets Steve at his possessions—all the stuff he’d had on him when the _Valkyrie_ went down. Knives, shield, dog tags. He’s only gotta touch ‘em for a half-second to know that all the anchors he’d laid in them sixty-seven years ago are gone.

He turns the tags over in his hand, metal clinking on metal, and—nothing. There shoulda been a feeling of—it’s almost warmth, almost stickiness—from the magic stored inside, the shape change spell that’ll let him get back into his little Stevie shape, his real body—but no. Nothing. Metal, inert.

He’s in the SHIELD office at Times Square, some disused meeting room, tray full of objects on the table in front of him and an agent at his elbow. She’s watching him like he’s a slide under a microscope, studying his reaction, because this is a test. Everything so far has been a test.

His anchors, his spells, it’s— _fuck_. He was half-prepared for this—was close to braindead when he’d had his lesson about anchors from Ulfadhir, but he remembers something said in passing about how saltwater corrodes magic, so. Sixty-seven years under the Arctic Ocean is a good long saltwater bath. His anchors are gone.

Means he can’t shift over to his real body, can’t use his sorcery. He’s stuck waiting for the shape change spell for his Cap-body to wear off.

If it _wears_ off—what if it— _fuck_ , Christ Almighty. What if it just _doesn’t_ wear off, after being frozen like this: what if he’s _stuck_ like this—

Stop. Open his hand, where it’s clenched closed around the tags, folding the metal in two. Breathe.

“Captain Rogers?” It’s the agent at his side: dark hair and glasses. Agent Sophia Chu—she’s got a couple degrees in head shrinking and the thankless job of helping him _acclimate_ to the 21st century. He’s been hassling her about getting his stuff back for two days, and now he’s got it and—

“It’s fine,” Steve lies, automatic as breathing. “It’s just—you know. A lot to take in.”

“I can only imagine,” she says, casting her face into an expression of deep earnestness: wide eyes, furrowed brow. She’s a good actor. Comes with the head shrinking.

Steve shoves his tags into his jacket pocket, grabs a couple of the throwing knives off the tray—

“There are laws about carrying concealed weapons, Captain,” Chu says. “For civilians.”

SHIELD keep reminding him he’s a civilian now. It’s part of the one-two-punch recruitment drive they’ve got going on, trying to sign him up for their cozy paramilitary secret police—they haven’t been crass enough to come out and ask him yet, but that’s what all the foreplay is for.

He was trained in geopolitics and interpersonal manipulation by an immortal sorcerer. SHIELD are neither as subtle nor as clever as they like to think.

“That’s fine,” Steve says, drops the knives, and—there are a couple of blades there that Ulfadhir gave him for his 22nd birthday, steel blued and as perfectly balanced as a ballerina en pointe. He’ll miss ‘em, but—push the tray away. Picks up his shield and turns to the agent.

She’s blinking. “It’s not concealed,” Steve says.

“That it is not,” she agrees. “But it is—”

“Property of the United States Army,” Steve says. “And intellectual property of Howard Stark. Neither of ‘em are here.”

She lets him leave with the shield.

 

*******

 

It’s been an interesting couple days, that much is fucking sure.

He has been assigned an apartment—it’s bleak, hotel-room bare, and the walls—he’s pretty sure the walls have ears. Pretty sure SHIELD are watching him even there: there’s a humming that never quits, shrill and so high-pitched it’s almost subliminal, and he’s gone around and unplugged everything—everything, Jesus, there are so many gadgets—but the humming persists. Eyes on him, ears, something. Everything is a test.

He’s been assigned a cellphone. It’s too small for his hands—if he didn’t know better he’d think it’s part of SHIELD’s campaign to destabilise him, to make him feel out of his depth so he’ll turn to them for help, for purpose—but everyone seems to have phones the same size. So. It’s probably just his big stupid hands.

He has two phone numbers saved to it. One is the sandwich shop on the corner down from the apartment. The other is Agent Chu’s.

He has been assigned a half-dozen tails that follow him around the city any time he’s not at the SHIELD office or in the apartment. No one has told him about them, but he knows about ‘em just the same.

People—they might have read about him on paper, but they don’t seem to really get it until they see him do something undeniably inhuman: his senses, his memory. He can hear individual heartbeats on a city street, can smell perfume or those strongly-scented chemical deodorants everyone wears now from a block away. He remembers faces, voices, shapes, patterns. He knows about the tails.

Hasn’t done anything about ‘em, yet. He’s being polite.

He’s been assigned readings, a list of documentaries, by Agent Chu. History, the whole second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Meant to catch him up on everything he’s missed.

It’s been curated. There are gaps.

They don’t know that he knows about the gaps. They don’t know he didn’t sleep the decades away: that he was awake the whole time in the ice, keeping up with world events as best as he could from the farthest frozen reaches of Greenland; awake and aware and—

He skimmed the readings on the first day. Walked down to the Public Library on the second day and—he’s never been able to sweet talk, not like Bucky could, or—but he flirted through his eyelashes and weaponised his best _ma’am_ until a librarian set him up on a computer and talked him through how to search for information, even though he’s got no library membership.

No fucking ID, for that matter. SHIELD again, doing their best to keep him leashed. You can’t do much without ID, these days.

There are gaps, in what SHIELD want him to know. He’s starting to fill them in.

If he was just a soldier it mighta worked, but—

If he’d been asleep in the ice, it mighta worked. But he wasn’t.

God help him, he wasn’t asleep.

 

*******

 

On the evening of the second day he gets home from the library to find a box of files on the floor outside his apartment door.

He pokes it with a foot—no hum or ticking, no chemical smell. Probably safe—or not a bomb, anyway. Safe is subjective. Files mean information, intel, real or falsified or curated or some mixture of the above. Means somebody’s agenda.

He fumbles in his jacket pocket—they’ve assigned him _clothes_ , for pity’s sake, all in bland colours and safe, old-fashioned cuts—until he finds his cellphone and—oh. Yeah. There’s a message from Chu, seven hours ago—always forgets to check this fucking thing:

_Package for you at home. Some more personal histories. If you need to talk through any of what you read, please call anytime—S.C._

Sure thing, Sophia. Absolutely. Steve fumbles with the tiny keyboard until he manages to type in: _Progress on return of my belongings? Thanks—S.R._ Crams the phone back into his pocket, picks up the box of files and unlocks the door.

It’s copies of the personnel files of the Commandos: SSR files from a million years ago, plus SHIELD files for the fellas who stayed with the organisation after it changed over.

Parts are redacted. The birth dates are not.

The death dates are not.

Jesus Christ, Jesus _fucking_ Christ—it’s been sixty-seven years. He was—he half expected this but—but still. Fuck, _fuck_ —

They all made it outta the war—everyone but Bucky, anyway, and the scar tissue on that old wound still aches like a son of a bitch every time Steve pokes at it. They made it out of the war, and that’s good, that’s—it’s a weight off. But they’ve died since, all of ‘em, worn away with the passage of decades: Dum Dum and Jim and Gabe and Frenchie and Monty, all of ‘em.

He’s the only one left. The last of ‘em, and the least.

He splays the files out over the dining table, and—he’s doing pattern analysis of the whole, studying the photos for traces of the fellas he remembers, because better that than dive into any one narrative, any one story of a life. SHIELD have ears in the fucking walls: he’s not gonna treat them to any signs he’s cracking up. This is a test. Everything is a fucking test.

And if he is cracking up—no, fuck that. He cracked up decades ago. This right here is just icing on the cake.

“Okay,” Steve says, just to shift the half-chewed lump stuck in his throat. Raps on the table and—he’ll leave the files out, read through ‘em—later, just _later_. Digs back into the file box, because there’s more in there—

_A00026  |  CARTER  |  Margaret Elizabeth, ALIAS “Peggy”  |  Director (Retired), SHIELD_

He doesn’t drop the file. It’s a close thing, hand spasming like someone’s stuck him with a sewing needle, but he doesn’t drop the file. He’s not giving his watchers the satisfaction.

Breathe. Centre. Find your edges, find your centre, just like Ulfadhir used to—count the breath—fucking _do it_ , fucking count ‘em out. You do not have the luxury of falling apart.

When he gets to a hundred breaths he takes the file and sits on the couch and starts reading.

 

*******

 

She’s still alive, is the first thing.

She’s alive, and—the file doesn’t say where, or that part’s redacted anyway—but he can find that out, easy as falling off a log. She’s _alive_ —

Keeps reading and—

And here is where he finds out about S.R. and J.B.

Peggy kept notes on the missions they ran—her and Steve and Buck, in ’44 and ’45, the missions that no one else in the SSR knew about because Steve was hip-deep in secrets, didn’t need anyone else knowing about—him. His sorcery. What a freak he is.

She’d kept notes, coded, what intel they got and where she farmed it out to, what he’d done and—it’s fine, she didn’t—name any names. Didn’t talk about the magic or anything.

 _Infil w sabotage of radio array, asset S.R., J.B. field support._ It’s veiled, there’s no direct reference to—

It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s just—

Her notes were declassified in 1995. And the world took notice, and—Lord Almighty, there’s reference to kids in college having written their PhDs about the S.R. mission files, about who S.R. and J.B. coulda been but she never gave him up—God, he owes her— _everything_. The biggest bunch of flowers in creation.

Until last year. Until—

_File note: Former Director Carter in failing health (likely diag. Alzheimer’s, refer to note from Dr. G. Harris on 7/22/11). Mental deterioration accelerating, i.e. losing orientation in time, failing short-to-mid term memory. Recommend relocation to SHIELD controlled care facility to prevent unwarranted spill of classified / sensitive intel as her health continues to decline. (Noted in conversation at care facility w. F. Dir. Carter today: S.R. = Capt. Steve Rogers [?!])_

Jesus _Harold Christ_ , they—those fucking _vultures_ —

He puts the file down on the coffee table, neat, precise, squared with the edges. Gets up and walks over to the window and opens her up, climbs out onto the fire escape and latches onto the steel railing with both hands and—

The metal wails like a new widow at the graveside. He keeps shoving, pulling, heaving at the metal rail with both hands until it’s twisted into a pretzel, and—

Stop. Breathe. Again with the breathing.

These fucking _ghouls_ went to Peggy as she—as she’s fucking _dying_ , as her whip-smart brain that’s always been her greatest strength fucking betrayed her, and extracted a secret outta her she’s been keeping for sixty-six years. God, what if she—

He hopes she doesn’t know. Jesus: it would kill her to know.

The metal groans again under his hands. Okay: more breathing.

This is— _fuck_.

This file, Peggy’s personnel file—it’s still classified. So only SHIELD knows, and only people with high enough clearance to have access to Peggy’s file. The whole world might know about S.R. and J.B., but it’s only in the upper echelons of SHIELD that they know—

About _him_. What he did. And yet they’ve still got no idea how he did it, how he coulda pulled it off. No idea about veils, seemings, about his sorcery.

Jesus, no wonder all the tests.

 

*******

 

There’s a copy of Peggy’s notes from their missions in ’44 and ’45 in the bottom of the box, page after page of her tightly-scripted handwriting. He flips through ‘em quick: it’s all stuff he knows, stuff he was there for, worded with all the care of a surgeon at the table to leave a clear trail of what they found, what they achieved, without mentioning any of the crazy elements.

No sorcery. No freak show.

Last pages and then an envelope and—wait.

Wait, that’s a—

 _7th of April, 1945_. That’s after he put the _Valkyrie_ down. Why has this one been included in the package when—

_APR 1945  |  MURDER IN CUSTODY [Zola, Arnim]  |  OPEN / UNSOLVED_

Well. You don’t fucking say.

There’s photos in the envelope, black and white. Arnim Zola is pinned to the bunkbed in his cell, long-bladed knives nailed through his liver, left thigh, left shoulder. There’s a wide red mouth opened up across the front of his windpipe. He’s still got his glasses on, neatly perched square on his nose. There’s—blood. A wide black pool in the photos. He bled like a Goddamn stuck pig. Must have taken a long time to die.

Jesus—and it happened in SSR custody. In a secured joint SSR-MI6 lockdown facility in the middle of London. How the Hell did—

 _Unknown assailant_ , Steve reads, and: _unknown method of entry and access to the cell. Protocol is visual observation of cells by patrolling officer every 15min. Guards (Yarrow, Hawkins, Glebe, Barnett) all insist protocol was followed and yet no one witnessed entry / attack / anyone leaving the cell / compound. Possible negligence / conspiracy of silence?_

Next to the typewritten paragraph there’s a note in the margin, Peggy’s dense handwriting:

_Could have used S.R.’s method??_

Oh. Oh, that’s—

 _Ulfadhir,_ you abject utter lunatic, you _son of a bitch_ , you—

Steve puts down the file again, climbs out the window and stands on the fire escape. Looks out at the cement wall across the alley but he’s not—he’s seeing Ulfadhir veil-walking past the guards, blade in hand, finding Zola’s cell and—

Steve could have pulled it off—Steve _has_ pulled it off, walked into a secured room and killed a man bloody, walked out again with none the wiser. It’s achievable, if you can cast a seeming to hide what you’ve done, throw up a veil in the room so no one hears the screaming—

Ulfadhir. Steve’s amoral and murderously patient father. Finishing the job Steve left undone, when he went down in the _Valkyrie_.

Steve stares into the dark, stares at the cement wall like it’s got the answers, takes more slow and steady breaths of the night air—exhaust, garbage, sun-warmed cement—and just— _holds,_ just holds it here, holds it together.

 

*******

 

Sometime around two in the morning Steve takes all the files out onto the fire escape, sits knees up on the flattened cardboard box and starts to read.

If there’s a camera out here it’s dark enough SHIELD won’t see much. And—the files: Peggy, his fellas—he needs to know. He needs to know.

 

*******

 

And then it’s the third morning, and Chu sends him the text message about getting his stuff back, and—

He’s on Amsterdam Ave, halfway back to his assigned apartment—he’s getting some sideways looks with the shield on his arm, but New Yorkers are blessedly gifted at ignoring the floridly weird, the crazy shit, continuing about their day, so—and he can hear the tags in his pocket shift and chime off each other with each step and—

Anchors. Anchors are corroded by exposure to saltwater. What if—

Holy Mary, what if—

He’s frozen halfway off the curb, one foot on the street, staring and—

God, he’s gotta—he’s gotta test this.

Gotta lose his tails.

Okay—back up onto the sidewalk, straighten up to his full height and look around and—there: a block back, standing outside a coffee shop and pretending to check her phone. Steve adjusts the strap of the shield, puts on his best purposeful look of determination, stares past the agent and the coffee shop, and strides back down that way like he’s got someplace vital to be.

He keeps up the determined look and the quick-march until he’s right in front of the shop and almost past her and—quick turn, step in and tug at the strap and—

He holds out the shield like it’s a waiter’s tray and stares fixed at the agent until it’s really clear he’s not moving and she looks up from her phone, blinking, trying to look innocent and confused. Eye contact, finally: grey-green eyes. She was wearing glasses yesterday; today she’s got a t-shirt that reads _FCUK_ and a brown wig.

“Agent, can you make sure this gets back to my apartment?” Steve asks.

“Sorry?” she asks, mouth tugging and brow tightening—like she’s locking down, trying to keep her expression from shifting.

“I made you two days ago,” Steve says, gentle: she’s young, can’t have been at this game long. “The shield, please?”

She stares at him, blinks, takes the shield slow and dreamlike.

“Appreciate it,” Steve tells her, gives her a nod and takes off again, and—

“How did you make me?” the agent calls after him when he’s half a block away, and Steve tosses a salute back at her and keeps walking.

It’s a twenty minute walk to Central Park—walking at human speed, anyway; he could get there in under five if he wanted to prove something, but—and then there’s the extra time doubling back, heading down into the subway and then popping out again, doubling back once more, ducking down an alley and jumping onto the fire escape and coming down again on the far side of the building and—

So it takes Steve closer to forty minutes to reach the park, all told, the other two agents that were tailing him today eating shit someplace half a mile back. They’ll find him again, he’s in no doubt of that: there’s the phone in his pocket, satellites in orbit, traffic cameras on every corner. But he’s got a few minutes lead time, and a few minutes is all he needs.

It’s a grey kinda day, enough that the park isn’t crowded: only the most determined tourists are eating street truck food and meandering over the grass and taking cellphone photos with the air of folks determined to fucking enjoy themselves, Goddamn it. He walks, hands in pockets, hunching a little to disguise his size, his shape, crosses lawn and passes through gardens and a couple copses of trees and—there, empty grass, empty sky.

He crosses the lawn, finds the rough centre, stops. Bends to mess with the tongue of his shoe and check his six—yeah, he’s alone. As close to alone as you get in a city of eight million souls. As close to alone as he’s been since the ice.

He stands again. Shoves his shaking hands into his pockets, thumb pressed firm over the mic on the cellphone.

“I—” he says. Stops, choking. Clears his throat.

“I’m a sorcerer,” he says, and it comes thin and clear and—Jesus God. Jesus fucking God, the _geas_ is broken.

“I’m a Goddamn sorcerer,” Steve says, louder, starting to grin, and then: “I learned it from my Da. He’s a Goddamn _immortal_ sorcerer from the planet Mars.”

He’s grinning like a lunatic, has to clap a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing out loud, and then—and then he stops because—

The _geas_ is broken, worn away by saltwater and time, and it’s sixty-seven years too fucking late for it to matter: there’s no one left alive for him to tell. And if the _geas_ is broken then whatever other spells he had on him must be broken too. Like the one Ulfadhir used to find him, seamlessly, wherever he happened to be in the European theatre or—

Ulfadhir is alive—most likely, anyhow, unless one of his enemies has caught up to him: sixty-seven years is nothing when you’re immortal. He’s alive and out there somewhere and he won’t be coming for Steve because he doesn’t know, the spell’s worn off and—

And it’s not like he’s got a fucking cellphone. It’s not like Steve can send him a Goddamn email.

Steve’s mouth is doing some stupid downward-pulling pouty thing. He rubs at his jaw until it stops, adjusts his cap. Takes some deep breaths.

Shoves his hands in his pockets again and heads for the library.

 

*******

 

On the fourth day, Steve wakes from dreams of the ice, on the floor next to his bed—the side away from the door: free of sight lines from the rest of the apartment and from the buildings across the alley. His Mam didn’t raise a fool—and has to lie still and just blink up at the ceiling for a minute, recalibrate himself because he feels—

Like everything in the room has shifted a couple inches to the left in the night. Like he’s ever so slightly turned away from true north.

The shape change spell is wearing off.

Thank Christ, thank _Christ_ and—oh, fuck.

 

*******

 

He’s got—maybe a day? He never tested how long he could hold the shapeshifting spell for, after he got to the front and started training his sorcery in earnest. Knows he got stronger, learned how to handle more of the fires of making and unmaking, could hold veils and seemings for longer so—

So maybe he can hold the shape change spell for longer too? Longer than the ballpark five day limit he used to have. Only—only being in the ice is gonna throw his count off again.

Bottom line it: the spell is wearing off. He has no fucking idea how long he’s got left before he’s snapped back to his real body like the inner tube of a tyre pinging back after being stretched out too far. And the walls have fucking ears: there is no place private for him to wait it out. Even in the bedroom, in the fucking bathroom he can hear the shrill whine of electronics humming away all hours of the day and night.

It’s almost enough to make him nostalgic for the war. Sure, Nazis were shelling him, but at least there wasn’t an international paramilitary intelligence agency devoting a chunk of its time and resources to making sure he never shits alone again.

He needs to—he can’t arouse suspicion. Can’t look like he’s trying to hide something, or they’ll only come at him harder. But he needs a way to hide, a place to hide, and he needs it yesterday.

Lies on the floor and watches the light grow and shift as the sun comes up. Then he gets up and gets dressed and heads for SHIELD HQ.

 

*******

 

Two hours later he’s loitering in the foyer at the Times Square HQ—if you hold your phone and stare into it, you can get away with standing around aimlessly pretty much anywhere you like—and watching the stream of traffic, people on their way into work, agents and technicians and scientists in generic suits, phones, travel cups of coffee. He’s gotta find—there, _there_ , that guy—

Steve turns, looks up from his phone, blunders into the target. He’s a shorter fella, blond curls, neat knit cardigan—and Starbucks cup on the foyer floor, coffee spilling. Perfect.

Looks up, meets the target’s eyes. “ _Sh_ —shoot. Man, I’m sorry,” Steve says.

“Ahh,” the target moans softly, mild Scottish brogue, staring at the coffee puddle with a tragic sort of look. Finally looks up at Steve and blinks, hard. “Oh,” he adds.

Steve’s got a short-list in his head of the people he remembers from the lab, from the time he spent defrosting: people on the tech side of the sandwich, engineers and technicians and repair guys. This kid: he remembers this kid. Talked the doctors through a new setting he’d programmed into their machine specifically for thawing out frostbitten super soldiers. This guy will work.

“I’m so sorry, I forget how much space I take up sometimes,” Steve says, pastes on a sheepish expression. “Listen, are you gonna be late? Can I buy you another one?”

Twenty minutes later Steve’s emerging from the Starbucks down the road with his new pal, Leo Fitz, engineer, SHIELD Science Division.

An hour after that he’s behind a pass-locked door in SHIELD’s R&D department, and Fitz is showing him all the cool new toys for monitoring targets in the 21st century—the bugs—tiny, innocuous, look like screw heads or phone jacks or thumb tacks or—and mini-cameras, the tracking algorithms built into cellphone software, the stick-on trackers for vehicles or clothing—

He’s a good kid. Smart as a tack. Steve—he doesn’t like lying to him, doesn’t like the necessity. And he likes being monitored even less.

 

*******

 

There’s a camera fixed to the underside of the TV screen in his apartment, black plastic casing so it blends in with the other blinking lights on the display. There are bugs on the top of the bookshelf, under the coffee table, and sewn into the decorative couch cushion—he gently cuts it free with a kitchen knife before crushing it, adding its corpse to the tiny pile of crushed metal and plastic on the coffee table.

There’s a bug on the underside of the kitchen bench, and another under the fridge. He’s up on the kitchen counter extracting the tiny device from the light fitting when his cellphone rings. He’s grinning as he pulls the camera out, crushes it between finger and thumb, tosses it neatly into the sink—he’d been wondering how far they’d let him get.

His phone is in the pocket of his jacket, still hung up at the entryway—he forgets to carry it around like you’re supposed to—so he’s gotta jump down and go fish it out and— _Unknown Number_.

“This is Captain Rogers,” he says, bright as a Sunday morning, tucks phone to cheek with his shoulder and goes back to delousing. He can hear one, close, the shrill near-silent scream of it, feels around and—there, behind the coat hook. _Crunch_ , bite of metal and plastic between his fingers.

“Captain Rogers,” and it’s _Fury_ —it’s Director Fury, sounding just as dry as the fucking Sahara. Steve’s biting on the inside of his mouth to keep from giggling like a schoolgirl. “I imagine there’s a damn good reason you’re destroying thousands of dollars in delicate monitoring equipment?”

“Guess I don’t much care for being monitored,” Steve says, and then: “Hang on one second, thanks,” and he tucks the phone under his arm and closes his eyes and cocks his head and _listens_.

No hum. Entryway is clear. Kitchen and living room are clear. Into the bathroom.

White tile is cool under his socked feet. He fishes the phone from his armpit, puts it back to his ear. “Thank you for your patience, Director—”

“Rogers, you were pulled frozen from the Arctic two weeks ago and revived with medicine that was not so much _experimental_ as _pulled outta our asses_. You’re also a high value target to countless enemies of the State. Did you consider we might be watching over you for your own protection?”

“I did consider it,” Steve says, pulling a bug from the wooden underside of the top drawer. “But, you know, I feel like there’s a middle ground somewhere between being safe and being free, and that middle ground doesn’t involve listening to people take a piss.” He crushes the bug on the counter with his thumb, adds: “Hang on, sorry, one second,” and shoves the phone back in his armpit and listens again. Still humming: at least once more. Keep searching.

The next one is behind the casing on the light switch. Fury is saying, “—find a compromise on this. There are threats in the world today that you are not prepared for—”

“I’m happy to compromise, absolutely,” Steve says. “This is me, opening negotiations,” and he holds the phone next to the bug he’s just pulled outta the wall as he crushes it, lets Fury hear the plastic and metal crunching.

When he puts the phone back to his ear, there’s quiet. He lets the quiet breathe for a minute, crosses into the bedroom—last room, humming away to itself like an intrusive fucking wasps’ nest. He grabs the bed frame with one hand and lifts, holds the bed cocked up to shoulder-height and starts feeling under the frame. “I’ve been real polite, so far,” Steve says. “Haven’t said a thing about the agents you’ve got tailing me every time I step outside. Even after the guy who was on me yesterday morning sat at that coffee shop on Park for over an hour and didn’t tip.”

There’s another couple heartbeats of silence, and then: “You keep your tails. At least until you’re more… acclimated.”

“Agreed,” Steve says—they’ll be easy enough to shed if he needs to, veil and a seeming and a quick double-back.

“We will continue to monitor the entry points and halls of your building. If somebody comes at you—”

“Fine, that’s fine,” Steve says, finds the bug under the bed frame—Christ, the humming has been driving him crazy at night, shrieking away right next to his ear—and squishes it.

“If we have reason to believe there’s an active threat against you—”

“Then we can re-negotiate,” Steve says. “Open lines of communication. You clearly have my number. Hang on, sorry,” and he drops the bed, cocks his head closes his eyes and listens again. Still humming. Keep searching.

He puts the phone back to his ear. “Are you—can you _hear them_?” Fury asks.

Okay: Fury is watching him search—there’s another camera in here. Good to know.

“Did your guys know that I can hear electrons moving through wires?” Steve asks in reply.

There’s another beat of silence, and then: “We’ll be in touch,” Fury says, and then the phone is beeping at him: _Call ended_.

 

*******

 

Three hours later the spell breaks.

He’s deloused the whole apartment and then done a second sweep for luck—starting to feel edgy, tingling in his fingers and toes. Closed the curtains, switched off his cellphone and removed the battery and little card—and he’s feeling outta step, like the whole world is catty-corner from where it oughta be, and there’s a slow tide of numb working up from his feet, ankles, knees—

Eats one of the protein bars SHIELD stocked the kitchen with and almost brings it up again. Lord, they’re almost as bad as the food-tubes, back in the War.

Strips to shorts and undershirt and lies down on the bed and waits.

The pain comes in a wave, slow and welling up from his core like the Hudson rising with the tide, sparking bright agony in bone and muscle and—and he breathes, keeps breathing, because he’s learned not to fight this, that it kicks harder if he pushes against it, does centring exercises like Ulfadhir taught him most of a century ago and breathes and—

The pain peaks and he’s arching, spine a long curved line of anguish, mouth open in a silent scream—he won’t, he can’t, he’s got rid of the electronic ears but there’ll be agents in the building and they’ll come running if they hear him—

Gaelic nursery rhyme and a few bars of jazz, Brooklyn traffic, the asymmetric rhythm of an asthmatic wheeze: his song.

It’s _his song_ , so loud for a few heartbeats that it’s all he can hear and then—other threads weaving in: building song, street song, dozens of strands of music from the people around, in other apartments and on the street. Manhattan’s song, and it’s been sixty-nine years since he heard the particular music of Manhattan, her buildings and streets and peoples: it’s the _same_ , the _same_ still—new notes woven in, but the same song.

Fire blooms, surges up from the bowl of his pelvis and into arteries and veins, into his fingertips and strands of hair—he’s almost aching with it, hands shaking as he lifts them up and—

They’re little. He’s little.

He’s _himself_ again.

“Jesus Harold Christ,” Steve breathes, and then he’s gotta cover his mouth with both hands to keep from laughing, or sobbing, or—both, probably both.

 

*******

 

When he wakes, four hours later—he’s got an old-fashioned alarm clock, wind and set, ticking away—he scrapes himself outta bed and goes to the full length mirror on the inside of his closet door to inspect the damage.

Ulfadhir warned him, sixty-seven or a million years ago, that any great acts of magic he worked would change him, show up etched into his skin and bone—because he’s a shapeshifter, because changing is what he does. So he’s prepared for anything, for—

He’s got wolf eyes. It’s the first thing he sees.

The iris covers most of the white now, huge and luminous and—they’re still blue. Or he thinks they’re blue anyway—apparently he’s still fucking colourblind—but they look much the same colour as he remembers, just—wolfish. And—

The flight feathers are still marked across the skin of his forearms. There’s more of ‘em now, different textures and colours: cormorant, snowy owl, gull, sea eagle. And bleeding out from the wing feathers on his right arm there’s—it’s a feathery line, branching, curled back on itself, and the skin around it is—blue-pale, like ice. Like the ice has been carved into him. He touches, hands shaking—yeah, there’s actually a fissure in the meat of his arm, painless, smooth, deepest blue at the base, and—

He rips off his undershirt. The fissure runs up his arm, curling and branching and stopping at the shoulder, but there’s more of ‘em: under his left tit and wrapping around his ribs, crawling out from the soft skin in the back of his left knee. Star-splintered between his shoulder blades and creeping up both sides of his back, his neck, to stop just behind his ears.

It’s the ice. Etched into him. Part of him, now.

“Okay,” he says, and—Jesus Christ, his hair is a bird’s nest—shaggy and _long_ , longer than he’s ever had it, longer than Ulfadhir ever wore his, down past his shoulders. “Okay,” he says again, grabbing a handful of hair and _tugging_ —and catches a flash of white and sharp and—

His teeth. His canines. They’re very… canine.

Traces ‘em with his tongue. Bares ‘em at himself in the mirror. He looks—

Inhuman. He’s always _been_ inhuman, sure, but he looked… enough like his Mam’s side of the family that he could pass for a normal fella. He’s not gonna pass anymore.

He looks like a monster.

“Okay,” Steve says a final time, closes the closet door hard. This is—

This is the cost. He’s a sorcerer: he gets to remake creation, to take all the laws of physics and turn them inside out. This is the cost of that power.

He can veil. He can wear seemings. No one ever needs to see this.

Right.

 

*******

 

On the fifth day Steve wakes at noon on the bedroom floor—he’s managed a couple of hours of sleep, in between dreaming about… it’s the wolves this time, that he’s watching them die, Goddamn global warming and extinction and—and his magic hangover is squeezing his skull like a vice, and the ripple pattern of the carpet is imprinted into the skin of his face. Scrapes himself up and goes in search of coffee.

He’s gotta put in an appearance today, give SHIELD something to look at—cameras went dark twenty hours ago, they’ll kick the door in if he’s off the grid for too much longer.

Sits on the couch, sucks the coffee and sugar off his spoon, and knocks up a seeming. Cap is neatly pressed, hair combed into shape, a sketchbook tucked under his arm—he’s a big step up on the real Steve, too-big undershirt falling off his shoulder and fucking rat’s nest of straw blond hair in all directions, one fang pressed against the metal of his spoon.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” Steve rasps, and the seeming parrots it back. The seeming—it’s good. Very good. Blinks, breathes, shifts its weight as it stands attentive, detailed down to the pores, down to the weave of the denim in his jeans. It’s—

—frightening. He’s spent the night playing with his sorcery, finding his limits now and it’s—it’s been almost seventy years since he last used magic. Really used it, not just bashing his head against the fire starter spell in the ice. He’d thought it mighta atrophied, like muscle trapped inside a plaster cast, but instead—

He’s—he used to—sixty-seven years or a million years ago when he’d lose his shit, lose control of his magic, it would… It would end badly. And now he’s—more. There’s even more—more of the fires of making and unmaking. More of him.

And he can’t borrow that kinda trouble right now. He’s gotta put out the fire that’s right in front of him first.

He’s been out of his body, adrift on the wind and borrowing, for most of the last seven decades. It takes maybe a half-breath of concentration and then—the letting go and he’s rising, loosened from the earth like a hydrogen blimp except—

It takes a few attempts to get it right. He dumps half the mug of coffee in his lap on the third try, flickering in and out of his body like a strobe light flashing.

Take six and he opens his eyes, his meat-and-potatoes not-human body eyes, and also _opens his eyes_ , opening up his awareness in the part of his mind that is floating just above his head, a slender green shoot off the larger tree of his soul, his consciousness. There’s sweat on his brow. His head fucking hurts, tension headache brewing as his brain tries to reconcile seeing the world from two different perspectives at once.

He’s done it: bilocation.

It helps if he closes his eyes. His physical eyes. He discovers this on the eighth attempt: his brain stops freaking out if he cuts down on the input to his physical senses.

Ulfadhir mentioned bilocation, seventy years ago—just in passing, once or twice, part of another lesson and never any mention of how to actually do it. So Steve will figure it out for himself, experiment, throw shit at the wall until something sticks. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that jazz.

So Steve’s sitting on the couch, eyes closed, boxers glued cold and wet to his dick and thighs with spilled coffee, grinning and sweating and—and he’s also moving down the stairs of the building, pulling his seeming of Cap along like he’s a tugboat hauling a big cargo ship outta the harbour.

He walks Cap out to the street, down to the nearest cross street and then east. He’s gotta move carefully, weave and duck so no one bumps into Cap in the flow of foot traffic—touch dispels illusions. He’s aware in a distant kinda way of the SHIELD agents tailing his seeming, faithful baby ducklings, but it’s taking pretty much all his concentration to do this much.

Twenty-five minutes to walk to the park, and then:

There’s an unoccupied bench next to a Japanese peace garden. He anchors the seeming there—it feels like moving your hand when you’ve slept on it wrong, cut off all the blood. He’s working magic in his body and then sending it out, through the offshoot of his awareness, twenty-five minutes walk to the east, into this moment, this seeming, this bench.

Cap sits. He starts to draw, pencil to paper, thousand mile stare. Kinda brooding. In the distance, one of the agents tailing him leans against a tree and starts tooling around on his phone.

Steve is a Goddamn artist. Also, Jesus _Christ_ his head hurts.

 

*******

 

He’s bought himself a few hours of privacy—real privacy, for the first time since he came outta the ice. No one is listening in, no one is looking for him, following him down the street or watching him sleep or running analysis on his fucking sandwich fillings from the corner shop.

Makes another cup of coffee and drinks it slow, leisurely, sitting on the living room floor in a square of sunlight like a cat. Then he hauls out his old dog tags from a kitchen drawer and works the shapeshifting spell, anchors it into the metal discs. He is not getting stuck in his Cap-shape again, not if he can fucking help it.

He doesn’t have any knives—has found roughly a million shops on the internet that’ll sell ‘em to him, concealed carry laws or not. He needs a credit card for that, though, which—SHIELD are still doing their level best to infantilise him, incapacitate him.

What he does have is a spare mug full of loose change.

He stores three Cap seemings into a trio of dimes. Anchors three walking veils into quarters, and a _break glass in case of emergency_ Cap-shape into a dollar coin, layered in there a few times over. Then he sits down with his shield and a nickel, places careful fingertips on the fine wire—still soldered neatly to the just-inside rim of the shield—and holds the nickel hard with the other hand, hard enough the scored wheel-edge of the coin bites into his palm. Takes a breath and centres his shit and starts to re-weave the _come-here_ spell that’ll call the shield back to his hand.

In theory, he’s a civilian. In theory he’s never gonna need to throw the shield in anger again. Steve’s not putting a lot of stock in that theory. The world hasn’t changed that much.

Steve was never a Boy Scout, but _always prepared_ is the kinda sentiment he can get behind.

 

*******

 

Midnight finds him Cap-shaped—his headache had been close to crippling after he’d finished working anchors and tooling around with bilocation and testing a couple theories. Hurt like he’d stoved in his skull—which he knows about first fucking hand, tested his bone density against a metal door and a grenade in ’44.

Shifting over to his Cap-shape was a quicker solve than veil-walking down to the bodega for painkillers.

Which means he’s wide fucking awake, the surge of frantic energy that comes when he first shifts over—jittery and urgent as a moth to a house fire.

He paces; he watches one of the documentaries Chu has assigned him—it’s a once-over-lightly about the Vietnam War. Makes notes in a middle page of his sketchbook about points he needs to follow up on, outside of SHEILD’s purified, sanctified information sources.

He re-sweeps the apartment for bugs. Hauls one of the family-sized pre-made vegetable lasagnes out of the freezer, shoves it in the oven, pokes at the dials until it cooks, eats the whole damn thing. Paces again.

Eyeballs the skyline out the windows and comes up with a half-dozen plans for how to get out of this apartment in a hurry, with or without sorcery, with or without hurting anyone.

And it’s midnight and he’s still wide awake and he’s gonna climb the fucking walls—

By one he’s six blocks over—along with his apartment and his cellphone and a closet full of boring and safe menswear, SHIELD gave him a pass to access an old boxing gym. It’s bugged, of course: they want to get an idea of what he’s physically capable of, in controlled circumstances. He can’t bring himself to care right now. Let ‘em watch.

The first punching bag lasts a minute and a half. Tears in half when he brings around a backhand strike, one he normally does with a knife in his fist.

There are a half-dozen more punching bags in a storeroom. He lays ‘em out like fallen soldiers on the gym floor, straight and even. Hangs the next one up on the chain. Goes back to work.

He’s working over the third bag when Director Fury finds him.

 

*******

 

The file opens to a photo of the cube, the one that powered the _Valkyrie_ , the one that spilled blue light that burned cold where it touched your skin and screamed like an avenging angel striking as it tore Schmidt to pieces and cast him into the black—

“Hydra’s secret weapon,” Steve says, and he could fucking _scream_ he’s so frustrated—why, in God’s name _why_ would you—

“Howard Stark fished that out of the ocean when he was looking for you,” Fury says.

It’s 1945 all over again. Only this time—

“He's called _Loki_. He's not from around here,” Fury says, and Steve nods, picks up a punching bag to square ‘em away again, and it’s not until he gets back to the apartment and finds the briefing package someone’s left on the kitchen counter—

Loki of Asgard. There’s a rough outline of a profile based on what they know so far: a sorcerer, a trickster, alien. Immortal. And there are a couple photos ripped from security footage, Loki standing over the bodies of SHIELD personnel with some kinda energy weapon in his hand, and—and Steve is staring down at the tablet on his kitchen counter, frozen like he’s forgotten how to blink, how to breathe.

Loki of Asgard. Tall, pale, dark hair slicked back. Slender, haughty features, like a hawk. Familiar Goddamn features, because—

He’s Ulfadhir. He’s Ulfadhir, he’s Steve’s _fucking Da._ Our Father, who art right here on Earth, fucking up SHIELD installations and—

Jesus Christ. Jesus _fucking Christ_.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve stands at the kitchen counter, frozen, staring like some kinda asshole, for a long time.

Eons pass. Civilisations rise and fall.

He can’t—he’s just—Ulfadhir is staring up at him from the tablet screen, that halfway-unhinged look on his face like he always got when Steve said or did something stupider than usual. Ulfadhir, in a SHIELD installation, pale as a corpse, with sinkholes under his eyes and a half-dozen dead security staff sprawled out on the ground around him. Two minutes after this image was taken, an explosion buried the whole facility under several million tonne of rock and—

Okay, okay—silver lining: Steve knows his Da is still alive. Alive and fighting Goddamn fit, apparently. The cloud is he’s also stolen an alien artefact that’s powerful on a scale Steve can’t even begin getting his head around and killed several dozen people and—

 _Jesus H. Particular Christ_.

And he’s—at some point Steve’s knees have folded, gently as a meringue sinking in the oven, and he’s staring at the side of the kitchen cabinet but— _Loki of Asgard_. Loki, like from Norse fucking myth Loki. Of Asgard.

Where the Hell is Asgard?

 

*******

 

An hour later a quinjet picks him up from the roof of the apartment building, and Steve has his shit together. Game face pasted on. He doesn’t know much—

—he doesn’t know enough. What he’s got is still intel SHIELD have given him: it fits their agenda. Ulfadhir—Loki—he’s mercurial, amoral, but he’s never shown much interest in playing the game of great houses like this before. Spying, lying, moving behind the scenes, sure. Turning an installation the size of a small town into a sink hole—not so fucking much.

He doesn’t know enough. Not about what’s going on, about anyone’s real motivations in all this. Not what the Goddamn cube—the _Tesseract_ , it’s called in the file—was doing in the basement of a SHIELD facility to start with.

He needs to find Ulfadhir, needs _answers_ , and—well, finding out secrets is kind of a specialty of his. Right in the thick of it seems like a good place to start.

The flight is smooth as butter. He’s used to flying as a bird: the idea that they’re crossing a quarter of the globe in a few hours is kind of dizzying. And he’s still got the tablet, still paging through the intel for the mission, which—

On the screen, a green giant screams and throws an Army Jeep at a tank. It’s—Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Dr Bruce Banner, according to the package. Erskine’s legacy, and Steve’s, whether he likes it or not. God knows how many scientists, how many decades of research and blood and sweat and tears went into trying to make more super soldiers, after Steve went into the ice.

And the whole time they were working from flawed data. Incomplete data. Fucking _lies_. Steve was never a super soldier and Erskine’s formula never worked. God, this poor asshole Banner was turned into—

Agent Coulson is standing over Steve, one hand gripping overhead like he’s kindly stood up on the bus so an old lady can sit. He’s the kind of bland professional absence of colour that’s a little too easy to overlook—Steve learned eyes-glaze-over-unremarkable veils before he learned how to shave, he knows about protective camouflage.

This guy could be beige wallpaper, except for how he came and stood over Steve’s frozen carcass pretty much every day during the defrosting process, asked questions, brought the doctors coffee. Steve remembers his face, had to choke back the idiot impulse to greet him by name when he climbed into the jet.

And—shit, Steve’s been silent, staring for too long—“This—uh, Dr Banner. I don’t remember _turning green_ or _psychotic anger issues_ on the list of risks when I signed the consent forms before Rebirth.”

Coulson quirks his eyebrows, mild as mother’s milk. “Prevailing theory is that Dr Banner’s particular… side effects are a result of gamma radiation. He thought it might hold the key to unlocking Erskine's original formula.”

Mother of God. Steve fucked up this guy’s life while he was stuck frozen under sixty feet of ice off the coast of fucking Greenland. His lies, his mistakes, passed forward through time and accruing interest over the decades. He’s—onscreen the green monster—Doctor Bruce Banner, by all reports a Helluva nice guy, physicist and a bunch of other things besides—screams and tears a Jeep apart and Steve blinks hard and thumbs at the screen until the video clip disappears again.

“There have been a lot of attempts to recreate the serum, over the years,” Coulson is saying, and—

“Why?” Steve asks. “I mean, it was—what, a fifty percent success rate. Me—” except not really, Erskine’s serum may as well have gone down the drain: Steve was never human, or not human enough for the formula to stick to him anyway—“And Schmidt. That’s… not good odds.”

“It’s human to keep trying, hope to beat the odds,” Coulson says. “And I think you underestimate the impact you had on the world, Captain Rogers. The importance of what you were, not just as a science project or a soldier, but as a symbol. That we could be better, could do better, could rise above ourselves.”

Steve bites down on the inside of his cheek to keep his face in check, keep from laughing or flinching. God, if only they knew.

Steve is working offa muscle memories, most of a century old and rusted and blood-stained, just trying to be a _person._ An adult, human-shaped person. Not a wolf, a sea eagle, a humpback whale, a slow-shifting sheet of ice. A _person_. He’s sure as shit not equipped to be anybody’s symbol.

 

*******

 

They land on an aircraft carrier, disembark blinking into sunlight—asphalt underfoot, reek of jet fuel. Planes form neat rows, and—and here’s someone come to meet them: a woman, redhead, bombshell, leather jacket—

“Agent Romanoff,” Coulson says, and then, “Captain Rogers.”

“Ma’am,” Steve says, auto-pilot: he remembers the name from the briefing package. Natasha Romanoff is codename Black Widow, half of Strike Team Delta—the other half being Agent Barton, one of the fellas Ulfadhir has turned into a sock puppet. So—so Romanoff’s tougher than she looks, is the point—looks petite until you get close enough see just how much of her is barbed wire muscle. Close enough to get inside striking distance.

Her part of the file was mostly blacked out. Need to know. Which just makes Steve want to know all the more: sorcerers and secrets, cats and catnip.

“Hi,” she says, and then: “They need you on the bridge. Face time,” she tells Coulson, and he’s gone, smooth as clockwork, and Steve—

Finds Romanoff studying him. She’s quite open about it: no sideways looks or lowered eyelashes. She’s silent for a long moment, mouth quirking to the side as she examines him—like he’s a horse she’s thinking about buying—and then:

“So,” she says. “How did you do it, S.R.?”

Steve—he’s already shut down—he’s hip-deep in spies, packed up all his tells and stray facial expressions in a box and shoved them in the back of his head before he even got on the damn jet. So it’s—he just wasn’t expecting a direct assault, is all.

“Do what?” he asks, cocking his head and making his best gently confused face.

“There’s a betting pool,” Romanoff says. “It’s worth a tidy sum, you know.”

Steve keeps up the politely baffled face. Romanoff watches him for a heartbeat, and then she grins, fleeting, before turning away, sauntering lazily up the flight deck.

“My bet is—is it your enhanced agility?” she calls back, and—it’s all very casual, this approach, her tone—it’s a test. Another test, of course. Steve follows her, slow, folds his hands into his jacket pockets. His anchor coins are a gentle warmth against his knuckles.

“Did you parkour up the sides of buildings, evade detection?” Romanoff continues, pauses for a heartbeat, adds: “Parkour, it’s a sport, lots of climbing and jumping and—”

“I’m a vampire,” Steve says. “That’s the trick. I turned into an equal volume of bats, and eavesdropped in the rafters of secret Nazi lairs.”

She turns back, tilts her head and frowns like she’s thinking: “I think Gable in Tactics has that one in the pool.”

“Is there really a pool?” Steve asks, voice coming smooth and even past the choking claustrophobia that people _know_ —know what he did, his secret missions, enough people to have a pool _betting on how he did it_ , studying him and poking at his history and Jesus God, what if someone figures it out—

“I wouldn’t lie about that. SHIELD has a few sacred traditions,” Romanoff says. “I’ll tell you all about it, and you tell me how you did it… S.R.”

“I told you,” Steve says, level, bland as porridge. “Equal volume of bats.”

She flashes teeth in a grin again. Steve thinks of Gertie, the wolf pack matriarch, showing teeth in a snarl right before she’d snap at the youngster giving her backchat. Natasha Romanoff baring teeth is a threat display.

He can’t get a good read on her, she’s—oh, wait—

Dr Banner is standing just beyond, in the middle of the flight deck like a piece of luggage abandoned at a train station—Romanoff has been steering them gently in this direction—fingers tangled together in an anxious knot and shoulders hunched—he’s not a big man, looks like he’s trying to make himself even smaller.

Okay. Okay, time for Steve to put his big girl pants on.

“Dr Banner,” Steve says, marches up and sticks out a hand to shake. Banner’s handshake is—based on the way he holds himself Steve woulda figured it’d be soft and kind of sweaty, but—but it’s firm, cool. Eye contact is brief but incisive. This is what it looks like when you’re not frightened for your own sake: when you’ve gotta be frightened for everyone else around you.

“Oh, yeah. Hi. They told me you'd be coming,” Banner says.

“Word is you can find the cube?”

“Is that the only word on me?” Banner asks.

 _I’m so Goddamn sorry, I ruined your fucking_ life—“No, no it isn’t,” Steve says, because the least he can do is be honest now, here, this much. “There’s a whole lotta words and three video clips in the briefing pack. But I’m not planning on fist fighting your alter ego, so—” and he goes in for a back slap, drops his head and drops his voice and—

“Take a walk for a second,” Steve says, low, close to Banner’s ear, head cocked so Romanoff can’t follow along, and Banner blinks, smiles nervously, takes a few shuffling steps.

Steve follows, hands back in his jacket pocket, and—they’re heading toward the edge, which—good, wind noise will cut chances of anyone effectively eavesdropping. “Must be strange for you, all of this,” Banner says, loudly, looks back and around, and Steve smiles his best bond-sales smile and steps in half an inch closer and:

“Listen—SHIELD didn’t need to include all that in my package. Not if you’re really just here to know a whole lot about gamma radiation. Way the intel was presented—it was like they wanted me to know your capabilities. My feeling is they’re hoping to deploy you—your Mr Hyde—sometime in all this. Which I figure you don’t want.”

“I _really_ don’t want,” Banner agrees, low, fervent. “I—the other guy is too dangerous. He’s nuclear-deterrent-level dangerous.”

“They know they can’t force you, so they’ll make it seem reasonable, inevitable. It will still be a manipulation,” Steve says.

“God, I just—I hate all this. _Spies,_ ” Banner hisses, and then another half-second’s eye contact and: “Why are you telling me this?”

 _Because I spent my entire life hiding from the government and the powers that be, hiding what I am, so they won’t Goddamn vivisect me to find out how I tick_. Because Steve has _fucking been there_. “I sympathise,” he says, instead. “There but for the grace of God go I, you know?”

Banner looks up again, meets his eyes and stares, studying, and—and Romanoff steps in, mouth quirked in a half-smile: “Gentlemen, you may wanna step inside in a minute. It's gonna get a little hard to breath.”

 

*******

 

And then it turns out the aircraft carrier is a helicarrier—it fucking flies, it’s a flying weapons platform on the scale of a small town. The _Valkyrie_ ’s bigger uglier great granddaughter. If God is good Steve won’t have to force-land this one in the Goddamn Arctic Sea—

And then he’s on the bridge when they find a match on—on the nightmarish intrusive tracking program SHIELD are running. It’s not paranoia if they really are watching you, Mother of _God_ —combing the cameras and devices of the globe for faces, voices. And it’s Ulfadhir, Loki, hair loose and evening dress, face clear as a spring morning in the camera shot on screen—Jesus, it’s really him.

“Stuttgart, Germany. 28 Konigstrasse. He’s not exactly hiding,” the agent at the station says, twisting in his seat to face them, and Director Fury nods, turns to Steve, and:

“Captain, you’re up.”

Twenty minutes later Steve’s back in a quinjet, Agent Romanoff in the pilot’s seat, and they’re en route to Germany.

He’s poured himself into the uniform SHIELD had ready for him, chewing hard on the inside of his mouth to keep from making faces at—Christ, it’s like his Godawful stage costume from the Spangled circuit went and had a baby with that skintight stretchy fabric everyone seems to wear to exercise these days. The fabric feels dense—like the bulletproof fibres Howard Stark used to make his uniform seventy-odd years ago—but it’s cut tight enough that if he doesn’t wear a cup the whole Goddamn world is gonna know which leg of his trou he’s put on first.

And there’s no bandolier. Nowhere for him to carry a knife or seven, openly or concealed. It’s like—there were comics made, after he went into the ice. A cartoon series, first in the 60s and then rebooted in the 80s. And they never show him with his knives.

Not even a fucking pistol: it’s the shield, always, and fists, and every time he saves the day by knocking some heads together and it’s very—it’s for kids, he gets that. They’re not gonna show gouts of blood hitting the walls, heads bursting in sheets of liquid brain and teeth, the shriek of men burning alive inside their tank or—it’s clean, safe, easily digestible. He’s a face on a lunchbox, he’s a _symbol_ , and it feels—

Like the world doesn’t wanna remember he was a soldier first. Like they’d rather not picture their _symbol_ with blood streaked over his hands and up his arms.

So. No knives.

There are pouches on his belt. He’s got his anchor coins stashed in ‘em. Super glues the nickel with the _come here_ spell for his shield inside the palm of his right glove. Glues the emergency Cap-shape dollar coin to the inside of his belt where it buckles over his abdomen. Takes maybe five minutes in the back of the jet—they’re already in the air—and then—

And then left hand to his chest, press so he can feel his dog tags digging into his skin, and right hand to the belt pouch of dimes with the Captain America seemings stashed inside ‘em and—breathe and _go_ —

And then he’s himself again, Stevie-shaped, wrapped up in a Cap-sized illusion, which—a few quick dabs of the illusion paint brush to fix up the uniform, swift as thought in the dark—and he’s hidden away again, smooth as Fury’s hairless scalp.

Rolls up his sleeves. Kicks off his boots. Digs a rubber band out of his belt pouch and knots his rat’s nest of hair at the back of his head. Folds his fingers into the conjuring gesture and closes his eyes and centres into breath, the movement of fire in his belly, through his channels. Sinks into the music. Breathes.

Fifteen minutes later the quinjet touches down in Stuttgart. The hatch opens, the ramp drops, and Captain America—or a really solid seeming of him, anyway—strides out onto the cobblestones. And Steve Rogers, sneaky little shit, veil walks out after him.

Ulfadhir is in the middle of a plaza, and—civilians all around him, on their knees. There are three seemings of him dotted around the space, blocking the choke points outta there, and—

And this isn’t Ulfadhir, this is _Loki_. He’s speechifying like some kinda politician. He looks Goddamn unhinged: pale as milk, sink holes under his eyes, teeth showing like a rabid dog every time he talks, smiles. This is—Steve’s never seen him like this.

Everyone gets a rude awakening when they figure out their parents aren’t infallible, can fuck up and fall down like the rest of us. Steve kinda feels like this awakening is ruder than most.

“There are no men like me,” Ulfadhir is saying, to—there’s an old man standing in the thick of the crowd, bent and shaking but standing, and—

“There are _always_ men like you,” the old man answers, and—shit. This isn’t gonna end well.

Steve reaches down into his belly, hauls up a fistful of power and throws it up and out—it’s a ghost light, a big one like a phosphorus flare, white so bright it’s painful—and no one else can see it, no one else so much as flinches but Ulfadhir—

Jolts. Stops, lowers his staff and turns and looks and—

Looks straight past the seeming of Cap and meets Steve’s gaze, clear through the veil.

Everything that Steve knows about lying, about putting up a front, about holding up a mask to show the world, he learned at the knee of his father—of this guy, this asshole right here, which means that—maybe no one else woulda seen it, but Steve does: the heartbeat of disbelief, of horror, of shame smeared across his face, and then—and then Loki’s front comes up and he’s grinning like a lunatic, saying: “The _soldier_ —”

Steve lifts both hands—one-two punch—fingers cramped into conjuring gestures, a veil in his left, an illusion in his right—and _go—_

He’s not a powerful sorcerer. Not on the kind of scale Ulfadhir is operating on. What he is, though, is an artist, and a cunning little rat fink, and with enough lead time—like, say, the length of the flight to Stuttgart—

Loki, the real Loki, disappears under Steve’s veil.

The illusion blooms, unfolds like yard after yard of silk handkerchief from a magician’s pocket—spills across half the plaza—and Steve’s striding through the guts of it, ducking to roll under—his own fucking arm, Captain America’s arm, swinging to punch Loki in the face and—and Steve comes back up, sways to one side to avoid the fake Loki’s counter, lunging forward after fake Cap—

It’s big. It’s noisy. It’s distracting. It’s taking a Hell of a lot of juice—Captain America and Loki of Asgard, brawling back and forth across the plaza, and—

—and Ulfadhir is still stood where he started, under Steve’s veil like he’s waiting for a bus, and Steve covers the last stretch at a run and hits him with all the grace of a Sherman tank and takes ‘em both down to the cobblestones.

He’s got a handful of Ulfadhir’s coat, other hand cocked back in a gesture of unmaking and—

“What in God’s name is wrong with you?” Steve snarls.

“Where shall I start?” Ulfadhir answers, and then: “I see death didn’t suit you.”

“ _Answer me_ ,” Steve whisper-screams, shakes Ulfadhir—his father, his fucking _Da_ —by the collar. “Jesus _Christ_ , Ulfadhir, this is—you have to _stop_ this.”

“I—” Ulfadhir says, and then stops, forces the words out like he’s choking on ‘em: “I cannot.” He’s—Steve can only just hear him, past the shrieking barrage of the illusion—it’s up to the part where Loki is firing a series of hexes from that staff he’s carrying and Cap is deflecting them back with his shield. Steve should get a fucking Oscar for this.

“There is no stopping what has been set in motion,” Ulfadhir says, and then his spare hand comes up—he’s still hanging onto his staff with the other hand, like it’s welded to his skin—and he’s grabbing Steve, hand to the nape of his neck, pulling him closer ’til they’re forehead to forehead and—

“It gladdens me. To know that you live.”

And Steve is frozen, staring, because—

His eyes—his useless fucking eyes—he can’t see the subtleties of half the spectrum of colour, all the blues and purples and—and he’s never needed to, with Ulfadhir, because the man favours greens and golds and—and his eyes are _green_. Bottle green, murky ocean green, anaemic grass green, shifting with his mood but— _green_.

And right now, staring back at him from a couple inches away, they’re a pale clear _blue_.

“What—” Steve breathes, stops, _listens—_ eyes closed and concentrating to hear past the screams of bystanders, the battering of fake explosions, the song of the illusion itself pouring out and through him like a river, a torrent—listen past all of it for—

Ulfadhir’s song. It’s wrong. It’s fucking _wrong._

“What’s _happened to you_?” Steve asks, words spilling like teeth punched outta his head, because Ulfadhir’s song—it’s his, recognisably his: ice floes and flashing cracks of flame, with a layer of cotton candy lightness dancing over the top—but _distorted_ , twisted. The cotton candy is poisoned. The ice no longer moves, hardened to concrete in ugly shapes, defensive spikes and—

“God,” Steve says, and it falls outta him like a sob. “I don’t—I—what in God’s name _happened_ —”

“Where shall I start?” Loki says again, and—

Music: new note weaving in, past the dozens of songs—bystanders, spell, Steve and Ulfadhir, the city herself—past all of it there’s a new song weaving—

His ear, his earpiece: he’s not _hearing_ it, he’s hearing it. Someone is playing some kinda Goddamn rock music over the SHIELD comms system. What the Hell is—

“Agent Romanoff—did you miss me?”

That’s—shit. Steve knows that voice.

He’s gotta—reaches and grabs for his illusion, reweaving it on the fly so: fake Loki gets the shield in his face, rocks back and weaves low, staff coming around lightning quick to take fake Cap in the knees and he’s down and rolling—

—over to Steve, to where Steve is still sprawled on top of Ulfadhir, collar in his fist and cobblestones under his knees, veiled and hidden and—

He’s got his Cap-shape anchor glued under his belt buckle—this illusion is too big and messy for him to even try and manage a shapeshift off the top of his head, he’ll leave himself dickless or something—drops the hexing gesture and lunges down to grab his belt and—

—and Ulfadhir heaves his weight forward, staff coming around to catch Steve in the throat and he’s spilling back, shape change tumbling through him swift and fluid and—and the music cuts out like someone’s flipped a switch and when he hits the ground and rolls he’s big, he’s Cap-sized, slabs of muscle over bone to cushion the fall and he’s coming up to his knees and—

Pressure on the back of his neck and he freezes—it’s the staff, the end of Loki’s staff. A hex at this range will blow his fucking head off.

Okay. Breathe, regroup—

Electrical scream—it’s cousin to Hydra weapons, how they used to sound—and then Loki is tumbling, thrown, slamming bodily into the plaza steps.

Christ on a _bike_ —Steve’s up, heaving up to his feet and turning so he can keep an eye on both directions, both threats: Ulfadhir is sitting up, slow, rattled, and—

And Anthony Edward Stark is landing on the cobblestones, neat as a dancer, red and gold armour gleaming like the waxed paint on a brand new car. Strides forward, like—Steve’s seen footage on the internet when he started searching for Starks, but it’s all shaky cellphone camera stuff, so seeing the suit close up and right there, how it moves— _light_ , light and smooth as an acrobat, and yet the fucking thing is heavy enough, solid enough—it’s like watching a marble statue walk.

Steve can appreciate art when he sees it.

Stark stops, hands extended— _repulsor beams_ , they talked about ‘em in a magazine article, those neat round wounds like stigmata in the middle of the suit’s palms—and then he fucking _unfolds_ like a Swiss Army knife, guns and cannons uncoiling from forearm and shoulder and—

All of it’s levelled at Loki at—at Steve’s _Da_ and he’s gotta—not throw himself in the way like a fucking idiot, just—hold, _hold_.

“Make a move, reindeer games,” Stark says, voice coming with a metallic edge through the suit’s speakers. And Ulfadhir eases back, raises his hands, releases whatever spell is holding his armour together so plate and helmet simper and fade out.

“Good move,” Stark says.

The razor-wire of tension coiled through Steve’s gut lets go all at once—okay, he doesn’t gotta watch his father commit suicide by Stark today. Every other Goddamn thing is fucked beyond all recognition, but there’s one small island in the ocean of shit. Breathe out.

“Mr Stark,” he says, and—round of applause, best performance—his voice comes level, smooth as whipped butter, not so much as a tremor on the out-breath. Fuck, _fuck_ —

“Captain,” Stark says.

 

*******

 

They’re in the air, quinjet somewhere over the Black Forest, when the storm hits.

“Where’s this coming from?” Romanoff mutters at the control panel—she’s lit up white and copper-red by the bursts of white lightning against the black of the night sky. There’s a sense of pressure in the air, a weight on Steve’s skin like—

Like when he had to force a shapeshift through in his Cap body. Like what _magic_ feels like if you don’t actually have the right sensory array to—

This storm isn’t natural.

He’s—is Ulfadhir—but it’s not him: still sitting, still cuffed, quiet and watchful—he’s looking out the window. Watching the storm. Flinches when a burst of thunder sounds, close.

“What is this?” Steve asks him.

“None of my doing,” Ulfadhir says, mild as milk.

“Not what I asked,” Steve growls.

“What follows lightning?” Ulfadhir asks—great, he’s back to answering questions with questions. It’s lesson time all over again. _What follows lightning_ —

Thunder. Thunder, _thunar—_ Thor.

“Oh, Christ,” Steve says, and then something hits the top of the quinjet like a sledgehammer meeting a cinderblock wall.

Thor: Steve read that part of the briefing packet through more than once—brother of Loki, first contact down in New Mexico—and Steve’s uncle, his fucking _uncle_ , not that he can tell anyone that or do anything about it. Alien, Asgardian, close to unkillable, fights like a tank. A tank that can fly, and thrown lightning. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, here’s another layer of icing on the cake—

Stark turns and hits the button to open the back of the jet, which—fuck. Oh, fuck.

“Don’t—” Steve starts, and then Thor lands on the ramp and strides inside, like he’s got a gilt-edged invitation, smooth and powerful as a hunting cat.

There was footage of Thor in the briefing—more shitty cellphone camera stuff. It didn’t capture the sheer fucking scale of him—takes something to make Steve feel small in his Cap shape—or the smell of static and rain and leather that rolls off him, the Goddamn density of his presence like he’s a lead weight on the surface of the world, distorting the shape of everything around him.

Steve—he’s got used to Ulfadhir, to Loki: he’s been part of Steve’s life so long it’s hard to remember a time before he came—so he’s used to his—his alienness, the weight of his attention, the way the air around him seems to thicken into soup. But Thor—Christ on a crutch. Steve’s got no problem seeing how people mighta thought they were gods.

And then Thor grabs Ulfadhir by the arm and hauls him up like he’s picking up a piece of lost luggage and they’re gone, out the back of the plane.

“Now there’s that guy,” Stark says.

“Another Asgardian?” Agent Romanoff calls from the front.

“That’s Thor,” Steve says. “That’s—he’s Loki’s brother.”

“So, are we thinking rescue mission?” Stark asks, broken halfway through as the armoured mask clamps over his face. “Rude.”

He strides toward the open hatch, stops just before jet gives way to open air, hands angling to take off again—

“You’re not gonna beat this guy in a fist fight,” Steve calls. “We gotta—”

“Not with _that_ attitude,” Stark answers—Jesus, this guy has an answer for everything—and then he’s gone, free fall and then a flare of blue light as his repulsors kick in and gone into the night, into the storm.

 _Jesus_. Fucking Christ on a bike. Steve snatches up a parachute pack from the rack and starts strapping in.

 

*******

 

Steve cuts his way free of the parachute when he’s still 60 feet up, before the chute can get him hopelessly tangled in the dense pine canopy. Catches a branch on the way down and lands on the forest floor, rolling across his shield to soak up the momentum. Comes up covered in pine needles: not the most graceful landing he’s ever made but then no one is looking his way.

Stark and Thor are making their level best effort to tear each other and the forest apart.

Which—fine. They wanna be hugely destructive toddlers, that’s fine: there are no bystanders to get hurt in this dick-measuring contest. But they seem to have forgotten about Loki, which—

Again: just fine by Steve. He doesn’t know when he’s gonna get another chance to speak with Ulfadhir before his asshole father’s in SHIELD custody again, under the weight of a hundred electronic eyes, a thousand listening ears.

He skirts the widening circle of destruction with Stark and Thor in the centre of it—roar of lightning and scream of repulsor blasts and the vast crunching punctuation of trees coming down—and claws his way up the rock face of a cliff to—

Ulfadhir. Loki. Sitting and watching the fight below like they’re performing for his personal entertainment, sitting cross-legged on the stone and smiling crooked. He turns when Steve heaves himself up onto the ledge.

“Care to wager on the outcome?” Ulfadhir asks.

“Everyone loses, because you’re playing both sides against the middle,” Steve answers, flat as a frying pan. “Ulfadhir— _Da._ What’s happening, and how—I can help you, okay? I’m here. Let me help you.”

“Help me?” Ulfadhir asks, turning away from the fight to actually meet Steve’s eyes, and his gaze is blue, ice blue, blue like the thinnest wavering edge of sanity before the fall into an icy fucking ravine.

“Yes. God forgive me, I’ll find a way to get you outta this hole you’ve dug yourself but—but whatever you’ve _set in motion_ , we can stop it together, okay? Please.”

Ulfadhir—twitches. Like he’s been prodded in the back, hard. And then his eyes glaze and he’s staring past Steve when he says, “There is no stopping the war to come.”

It’s like talking to a wall. Like talking to a fucking trained parakeet. This is not—

This is not Ulfadhir. This is not—

The changes in his song. In his eye colour, in his—how he carries himself, the obscene grandiosity, this—this repetitive speech bullshit. Like it’s a compulsion. Like he’s being compelled.

“Oh Jesus,” Steve says. “You’re under a _geas_.”

Ulfadhir shifts, slowly, gaze still absent like—like how Steve used to get when he was a kid, swept up in the music and losing track of conversations, of school lessons. Turns back to watch the fight again. HIs hand works absently, fingers curling and uncurling.

“Can you even hear what I’m saying?” Steve asks.

“I can _hear_ , I just choose not to attend to the whimpers of a spoiled child,” Ulfadhir answers, sneering, and—

And there might be no one else in the world—in Asgard, on Mars, anywhere—that woulda seen it, but Steve can see it, recognise it: the hollowed-out empty behind Ulfadhir’s sneer. The traces of anguish around his eyes. Fuck, Jesus—

“It’s a good thing you’ve spent seventeen years buying my Goddamn loyalty,” Steve grits out, and—

“Like a well-trained dog,” Ulfadhir says, interrupts, mouth twisting like he’s bit into a lemon.

“—because I’m gonna figure out a way to help you even when you’re behaving like a _piece of shit_ ,” Steve hisses, and then: “God Almighty. You couldn’t have worked in a lesson somewhere about _geas_ -breaking?”

“It’s not a _geas_ ,” Ulfadhir snaps, and then—and then flinches hard to the side like he’s been slapped in the face. Falls silent, staring fixed into the distance, so still it’s like he’s forgotten about breathing.

And then—

And then there’s the catastrophic bass-note _scream_ of tearing wood and the ringing _clang_ of armour and—and Jesus Horatio Christ, Stark is lying half under a downed tree—he’s gone through it, Thor has thrown him _through_ a Goddamn tree, armour and all, and now Thor’s stood with his arm up, hammer to the sky, and lightning is coiling down to his hand like smoke reversing course back to the flame, static playing over the metal of the hammer, the air welling thick and tight with—

“Mother of _God_ ,” Steve snarls, and—and he’s halfway down the cliff in a heartbeat, jumping and catching at outcrops of rock to change course and jumping again and— _parkour_ , Romanoff said, _it’s a sport_ , and his breath huffs out in a strangled laugh and then—

Cliff base, forest floor, over a dead tree and _run_ , because Howard Stark will never let Steve fucking forget it if he lets Howard’s lunatic son get blown to bits by an actual motherfucking alien with a cape and lightning powers, of all the Goddamn things, and—diving across another fallen tree and rolling up and running and _there now now_ —

Knees to the ground like he’s sliding for home, shield up, glimpse of Thor’s—can only see him from the hips down with the shield up and—straddling Stark’s downed armour and brace—

There’s a _craaang_ like a howitzer shell hitting a church bell and Steve’s whole left arm flashes white-bright pain and then numb and down into his shoulder, ribs, and he can’t see past the shield but—

But the ringing of the bell echoes and echoes out, sound layering and—and the chthonic wail of wood tearing and trees coming down like thunder and the earth is shaking, shaking under his knees, stones and mud pressed to torn skin where he’s ripped holes in his trou with that slide and—

And fading, rippling and fading until the metallic howling has simpered away to a ringing in his ears and Steve lifts the shield enough to look out, enough to see.

Thor is twenty feet away, sprawled in a bed of shredded tree and wood chips, scraping himself up, hand out—and there’s a humming ring and then the hammer _flies back_ to his hand like—like the _come here_ spell, like—and he’s up again, like _Jesus Christ_ what does it take to even slow him down.

Not gonna win a fist fight with him. New plan—“Thor, son of Odin,” Steve screams, and he’s shaking all down—whole left side is still numb, and—he’s been around Ulfadhir his whole life: can mimic the turns of phrase and tone and pitch and—try to sound Asgardian enough, just enough to get Thor to stop and _fucking listen_ —“Hold your hand,” Steve yells, and Thor—stills. Cocks his head to the side.

“You are brother to Loki, the trickster. You are familiar with his games,” Steve says, talks fast, and he’s probably still yelling but his ears hurt like someone’s jammed a pencil in there. “Who always benefits when those around him descend into chaos and squabbling?”

Thor blinks, and then—and then lowers the hammer.

There’s a silence that rings—or maybe that’s just Steve’s Goddamn ears, and then—“Your shield is fearsome well-made,” Thor says.

“Yeah, I kinda like it,” Steve agrees.

“You have my name, but I do not know yours,” Thor says, shifting, like he’s uncoiling, tension oozing off like wet paint slicking off a sign in the rain.

“I’m—” _your Goddamn nephew_ “—Captain Steven Rogers, son of Joseph.” _Steve, daughter-son of Loki. Hello, uncle._

“Look, I have a checkered past and all but this is still a little much for a first date, big guy,” Stark says, faceplate up, from between Steve’s knees.

 

*******

 

Later there’s the quinjet—Romanoff bringing the plane down neat as a ballerina en pointe in the middle of the cleared blast-circle—and Steve and Stark and Ulfadhir and Thor all piling in like they were waiting for the bus after a rough work shift, Stark shedding pieces of dented armour with each step.

Later there’s the flight back to the helicarrier, silent as the graveside, Loki cuffed and gazing into the distance and Thor watching Loki and Stark watching Thor and Romanoff staring into the curved glass and watching _everyone_ and—Jesus, if ever there was an alliance built on shakier foundations—

Later there’s the helicarrier and Ulfadhir being led away, SHIELD agents in riot gear formed up around him as he’s taken into the bowels of the ship and he’s—

Steve gets a last glimpse before Loki disappears around a corner, and he’s—shoulders down and back, head up, smiling crooked and serene. Unearthly blue eyes are calculating and clear as sunlight through ice. It’s not a front. There’s not a _trace_ of fear or anger or—

Which means he’s right where he wants to be.

Which means this is his plan. Maybe was the plan all along.

Which means this is a trap.

 _Goddamnit_.


	3. Chapter 3

The door is impenetrable. It’s steel, layered half a foot thick. It’s electronically controlled—there’s no lock he can pick, and if he hexes the mechanism chances are it just seals closed. So he’s stuck, stood, veiled and watching and—and Ulfadhir’s on the other side of that door, there are _answers_ on the other side of that door, answers he needs and—

And they might as well be on the far side of the moon, might as well be in the depths of fucking space along with the Goddamn army of aliens that’s coming, coming for Earth, coming for them all—

Steve could—he has seen Ulfadhir— _shit_. Loki, he’s seen _Loki_ , lunatic asshole with command of the Goddamn alien army poised to invade the Earth like an unstoppable plague of locusts, and Steve’s _Goddamn father_ —he has seen Loki walk through a sheet of glass. It was a shop window, menswear, natty suits on mannequins like Steve coulda maybe afforded if he’d saved a year of wages. Saw the glass ripple gently like a pool of water disturbed by the fall of a dead leaf, and then still, intact and smooth and flawless, with Loki stood on the far side.

Shadow walking, he’d called it. So it’s possible, but—

But that was one sheet of glass, not a six-inch thick door of plate steel. And he never actually taught Steve the trick of how to do it, which—there are things Steve can probably figure out if he just tries it out and screws the pooch a few times. Drawing with forced perspective, say, or applying eye shadow. Walking through steel is not something he wants to try and fuck up—can see himself stuck halfway, or sliced sheer in half, or—

No. No, there’s gotta be—another way. A more cunning way.

 

*******

 

How it starts is:

“I don't think we should be focusing on Loki,” Banner is saying. They’re sitting around a conference table—standing, Thor is standing, restless—and Steve’s gotta tear his eyes away from the blank screen on the wall, the screen that was just showing Loki, Ulfadhir, locked away in a giant-killing cell. “That guy's brain is a bag full of cats, you could smell crazy on him.”

“Have a care how you speak,” Thor pronounces, like the Hand of God writing on a wall. “Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he’s my brother.”

“He’s killed eighty people in two days,” Romanoff says, level as the edge of a surgeon’s blade.

“He’s adopted,” Thor says, and—the _Hell you say_ now—

“Adopted?” Steve says. “That’s—that’s not in the file.”

Thor looks down, crossed arms pulling tight across his middle like he’s trying to coil in on himself. “We only learned a handful of moons ago that—Father chose to raise us both as his sons, to let nothing so small as blood come between us—”

— _he lied_ , Steve translates, lied like a snake on its belly—

“—but Loki was born the son of Laufey, sovereign of the Jotun. They—the Jotun have long been the enemy of Asgard.”

Jesus H. Christ. Well that’s— _shit_. That sure is something.

“The Jotun?” Steve asks, and there’s a rasp in his voice he can’t quite chase out but—

“On Midgard, your stories remember them as the frost giants,” Thor says.

_Frost giants_ , and there’s—there’s something that—that—

Frost. Means cold, means ice and—and he’s sure as Hell missed out on the _giant_ part of his inheritance but _frost_ —

Merciful fucking Christ on a cracker. Fucking God Almighty, oh God, oh—

No wonder he survived the ice.

No wonder he—and he’s locked down hard, frozen in place like a puppet abandoned by its puppeteer because he can’t—can’t fold in half and put his head in his hands and tear at his hair and laugh or sob or—

He shoulda died. He shoulda died and it all coulda stopped but instead he lived and did seven decades in solitary confinement as a frozen side of beef because he’s _half fucking frost giant_. Fuck.

“Yeah, I’m less interested in _why_ Loki’s kicking over our sand castles and more interested in how he’s gonna do it,” Stark says, and—shit, when did Stark walk in? He and Agent Coulson both—can only have been while Steve was losing his tiny Goddamn mind which—Christ, there’s no time for this. No time for his existential crisis. He’s gotta keep his head in the game—

“The iridium, what did they need the iridium for?” Banner asks, and Stark’s got an answer and then they’re off, rapid-fire exchange of technical jargon and ideas on a level so far above Steve’s head— _thermonuclear astrophysics_ , for pity’s sake—

After Banner and Stark disappear to start work on tracking the gamma radiation from the cube everyone else kinda drifts off too—they’ve all got jobs to do. Everyone but Steve. Everyone but Thor.

Thor’s standing at one of the vast curved windows looking out at the world below—water, white-topped, soft curves of mountains and land visible on the horizon and—

—and at some point Steve needs to talk to Thor. Really talk to him, squeeze him—subtly, tenderly squeeze him—for intel, find out what the Hell happened to Loki. Maybe… Of all the people on this team, on this ship, on this Goddamn planet Thor is probably the only other one who gives a single shit about Loki, who wants to find a way through this that doesn’t end with Steve’s Da on the business end of a rifle or a repulsor beam. So Thor is an ally, maybe, if Steve can…

Not yet. He needs an opening, a story. A lie. Something.

Steve leaves the bridge and goes exploring.

 

*******

 

The door is impenetrable. The access terminal is on the wall to the right of it: eyeball scanner and palm print locked. Biometric access. So no one gets in or out if they’re not SHIELD, a certain level of clearance, which—which Steve is not.

Stares at the access terminal. Chews at his lip. Works his hands through the conjuring gestures, cracking his knuckles as he goes.

He’s not SHIELD, but he is a sorcerer. There’s gotta be some way to—his illusions are good, but they’re not that good, not _palm prints and eyeballs_ kinda detailed. But—but he is a shapeshifter. His eyeballs and palm prints are malleable.

He needs—shit. Goddamnit, he’s been in his Cap shape every time he’s been around SHIELD personnel so far: when he first came out of the ice, when he checked in at Times Square HQ, on the jet coming here. Cap shape, which means headblind and dumb and deaf, insensate. If he’s gonna do this, gonna try this, he needs to have someone’s song, to know it well enough to mimic it, copy it.

Everyone has a song—their particular pattern of energy and presence and consciousness, woven into the vaster web of creation as it sings itself into being. If he can—he’s never tried this before: borrowing the song of a real living person and copying it—but there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work. In theory.

He just needs to find someone who—someone with a decent clearance level—and listen to their song, hear it through a few times so he can copy it—

Wait. Wait. On the jet to Stuttgart—he was in his real body for most of the flight and—

And Natasha Romanoff was in the pilot’s seat.

 

*******

 

After the meeting, after a couple hours of exploring the helicarrier—he’s systematic about it, finding and noting the places where there’s no surveillance, the places with doors that he can’t access, anything that might be interesting or useful when the shit hits the fan—

After he’s walked the helicarrier from nose to tail what happens next is:

—is Steve walks into the lab just in time to see—

“Ow!” Banner yips, and Stark—he’s just poked him with some kinda tiny electrical probe—leans in to study Banner’s face, eyes, like—

Like a Goddamn lab rat.

“Nothing?” Stark asks, and—

“What in God’s name is wrong with you?” Steve asks, and—he’s distantly aware that there’s suddenly a lotta Brooklyn in his vowels, that he’s flushing cold down his spine and through his belly—this is his nightmare. He’s had this actual nightmare, more than once: poked and prodded and stared at and—

“It’s okay,” Banner says, and—and somehow Steve’s in the middle of the room and his hands are in fists and Banner and Stark are both staring at him. “Captain, it’s all right. I wouldn’t have come aboard this ship if I couldn't handle pointy things.”

“It’s not okay,” Steve snarls, and—shit. Breathe, Rogers, come on. Fist to his chest and centre and stop—you gotta stop, gotta wind it back. Breathe and try again: “It’s not about what you can handle, Doctor. I know you wouldn’t have come here if it put anybody at risk but—but you didn’t sign up to be anybody’s lab rat.”

“Who died and made you the experimental design ethics committee?” Stark asks.

Steve bites back the first twenty answers that immediately pop into his head and just levels a dead-eyed stare at Stark, who—pauses. Shifts his weight and his gaze like he’s just remembered who he’s talking to. Shapes his mouth into a pinched little _oh_ and fidgets with the tiny probe.

“Awkward,” Stark says, after a moment.

“You think?” Banner asks.

“Can we focus up on the job in front of us?” Steve asks. “With the whole looming threat of alien invasion?”

“I’m very focused,” Stark answers, turning back to the second work bench: his dented armour is spread out in chunks, mid-repairs. “I’m working the equation, but I’m still missing some variables. Like: why didn’t Fury call us in before? What are we not being told?”

Steve—freezes for a moment. God, for a second he’d sounded just like Peggy when she was working, following the threads of evidence back—“How long do you got? He’s a spy,” Steve says, letting his mouth crook into a half-smile.

Stark stops mid-gesture and—studies Steve for a second, like that wasn’t the answer he was expecting. “Right,” he says, nods. And then, arm out to indicate Banner: “World expert on gamma fields.” Points modestly to his own chest, fingertip resting on that blue circle of light under his shirt. “Direct inheritor of dear old Dad’s notes from working with the Tesseract previously, and kind of a genius. And yet we’re both on the outside—why? What were they doing with the project that Fury didn’t want us to see?”

Steve leans a hip against a bench, crosses his legs, stares at the toes of his boots. “Fury’s story is they were studying the cube to try and generate clean energy.”

“ _A warm light for all mankind_ ,” Banner says, musing, and Steve looks over; Banner is stood with his hands splayed on the workbench, leaning over Loki’s sceptre, his gaze distant. “Even if Barton didn’t tell him about it, Stark Tower has been all over the news.”

“The arc reactor?” Stark asks, screwdriver deep in one of the armoured boots. “You think Loki was poking at me with that?”

“I think…” Banner slows, chews over what he’s saying, starts again: “It’s interesting that Tony’s not part of a SHIELD clean energy project, given his work on Stark Reactors—that building will run itself for what, a year?”

“And that’s just the prototype,” Stark says.

“Okay, so—if it’s not clean energy, and—whatever it _is_ , Fury didn’t want us knowing about it—then what the Hell were they doing with the cube?” Steve asks.

“An excellent question,” Stark says. “One I should be able to answer in—oh, three hours or so—when my decryption program finishes breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files.” He waves the screwdriver at one of the screens next to his head and—

And for a half-second Steve’s gotta strangle the urge to laugh because—Jesus, it’d serve Fury right to have all his precious secrets spill, when he’s been lying and manipulating all of them from the start but—

But then, Fury’s not the only one with secrets buried in SHIELD’s secure files.

_Noted in conversation at care facility w. F. Dir. Carter today: S.R. = Capt. Steve Rogers._

“You can’t do that,” Steve says, hearing himself speaking from a distance, echoing and thin as a hungry ghost.

“Uh, correction. I can, and I am,” Stark says. “Or rather, Jarvis can—he’s been running decryption since I hit the bridge,” and he reaches up, grabs and pivots the screen to display the jumble of coding.

“No, I—you can’t. There’s gonna be stuff in there that could—topple governments, or—or put covert operatives at risk,” Steve says, shutting down hard so—he’s flailing for an answer, he’s got fucking _nothing_ , and his first stupid instinct is to just hex the computer but he knows enough to know that’d be like stabbing the cinema screen because you don’t like what the projector is showing. Goddamn it—

“I’m not exactly planning to share it on Twitter,” Stark says.

“Twitter is—” Banner starts, softly, treading carefully, and—

“I know what Twitter is,” Steve snaps, and—and feels like a piece of shit because he’s not pissed off at Banner, so why is he being such an asshole about—

“I’m capable of some discretion,” Stark says.

“Three-fourths of the Western world have seen your dick on the internet,” Steve says. “I’m not sure you know what discretion is.”

Stark puts down the screwdriver, plants his fists knuckles-down on the workbench and leans into them. “I’m sorry, I forgot you had your sense of humour shot off at Omaha Beach.”

“You cannot do this,” Steve says again, pointing at the screen, and he’s gotta—grit his teeth and hold his breath to keep from changing shape, hexing everything and running away, the dumbest animal response surging up from low in his belly—wolf response, bite and snarl and—

“We’re agreed that Fury is keeping something from us, and I think it’s important that we know what that is,” Banner says. “Nothing needs to leave this lab.”

“Jarvis is internally secured,” Stark says. “If Watergate two-point-oh happens, it won’t be because we spilled the beans. Promise. No muss, no fuss.”

“Were you also internally secured when your company turned out to be selling weapons to terrorist organisations under the table?” Steve asks. “Because I don’t think I put much faith in your security.”

Stark rears back, comes out from behind the bench and stands squared up like—like they’re gonna touch gloves and go back to their corners, Marquis of Queensbury, weight forward on his toes. “I put a stop to that,” he says, low and solid as stone. “The second I knew, I put a stop to that personally.”

“Oh, so you weren’t _choosing_ to profit from terrorism,” Steve says, mild as milk. “You were just grossly negligent.”

“And you were a lab rat, Rogers. Everything special about you came out of a _bottle_ ,” Stark snaps, and—

—and it’s so _wrong_ , so patently untrue—nothing of Steve came from Erskine’s formula, from Project Rebirth. He _made himself_ , is forever remaking himself, his own fire and will and most of his Goddamn life in training—that Steve is frozen for a half-second and then—

—and then he laughs out loud, helpless with it, head thrown back and—

And it feels like glass is shattering somewhere, like he’s put his fist through a backdrop mid-scene, gone off script. Stark and Banner are staring at him like he’s lost his Goddamn mind but he can’t stop laughing, the terrible pressure and anger and fear that had been rising in his centre gone like someone pinprick bursting a balloon.

God—it was subtle, but it was there.

A compulsion.

Loki’s a Trojan horse. He’s sowing discord, weaving it in at the base level, a million miles below the conscious mind. Bringing them down from within. No wonder he wanted on the ship.

“Oh God, you broke him,” Banner says.

“No,” Steve says. “No, that was perfect,” and he gives them both a salute and turns—Stark is wearing a look of baffled anger—and walks back outta there.

Loki, Ulfadhir: this centres on him. Steve needs answers, and there’s one place he knows for sure he’ll find ‘em.

 

*******

 

The corridor outside the lab has surveillance cameras up—keeping an eye on the guests—and so does the corridor outside the detention area. Between point A and point B, there are a dozen corridors and catwalks and service ladders with no surveillance at all—this thing is an invisible flying fortress. The enemy isn’t supposed to get this far inside.

They are not prepared for Loki. They sure as Hell aren’t prepared for Steve.

He changes over to his Stevie shape halfway down a service ladder, one arm hooked through a rung in the ladder and the other pressing his hand to his chest, pressing dog tags to skin under the uniform.

Conjures up a walking veil and emerges at the bottom of the ladder veiled from sight, pulling another rubber band from his belt to get his Goddamn hair out of his face.

Sheds boots and gloves and shoves them through the metal grill of the catwalk underfoot, with a quick and lazy veil pinned over ‘em.

Prowls through the belly of the helicarrier, maintenance and service tunnels, pipes and wires overhead and the catwalk hard under his bare feet.

Which takes him to the detention area, to the door that leads into the giant-killing cell. In to Ulfadhir, and answers.

 

*******

 

The door is impenetrable. The biometric scanner is blinking placidly at Steve, green lights of the display winking on and off, waiting.

All he needs is an eyeball and a palm print, which—which he can manufacture in-house. Probably. He just needs a song, which—

Agent Romanoff of Strike Team Delta—she’s SHIELD, and her clearance level is good. Has to be: the first thing she’d said to Steve was asking him about the S.R. missions, which—which means Romanoff must have access to Peggy’s personnel file. And he’s heard her song; heard it all the way through three or four times in the jet flying out to Stuttgart.

Romanoff’s song: the first thing you get is the piano melody, some complex soaring tune, swift and shatteringly high. Beneath—beneath is a whine, a wail, almost subliminal, and it’s not quite a kettle boiling and it’s not quite a child wailing and it’s not quite an electronic dead-noise hum but it’s kinda like all of them. And there’s a pulsing rhythm to it, slow and deliberate, layered over the rest of the song: gunshots, the barking clap of small arms fire, and—and a lull-beat, where the song dulls out for a second, like a clot of snow has fallen and smothered the sound of it.

So—so. Deep breath. Hands in the conjuring gesture. More deep breaths—Christ, this is—okay. Okay. Close eyes. Fall into the music, into the well of fire rising up from his belly and—

And begin to sing.

It feels—the first time he shapeshifted into his Cap shape, it was like pushing a boulder uphill. Like he had to lean into it, push and push, dig his toes into the soil of the hillside and pour everything he had into it, fire and soul and song and will and then—and then the top of the hill and the boulder ran away from him, ran back over him, crushed him into pulp.

This time he’s pushing a boulder uphill, and the boulder’s made outta custard. And he’s only changed his shape a thousand Goddamn times since he first learned the knack for it, so—it’s not a matter of muscle this time. It’s a matter of—it feels _wrong_. Feels like he’s leaning on a wall and he’s just put his hand through the skin of rotting wallpaper and into the nest of rats behind. It’s Godawful, and _squirming_ —

Keep singing, keep twisting his hands—fingers aching in the conjuring gestures, holding ‘em stiff so this slippery fuck doesn’t unravel on him, and—

And then it’s unravelling, threads of song and fire unspooling everywhere and he’s grabbing after ‘em, flailing, and—and the song is coiled like a rope twisted back on itself, untwisting, tension released all at once to flick around and—

It’s like catching the back of God’s hand across the torso and he’s falling, can hear himself coughing out an “ _Oof—_ ” in a voice that—

That doesn’t… sound like him—

Oh _shit_. Oh, Christing fuck.

He’s sitting himself up, he’s patting himself down and— _she_ , she’s patting herself down, finding hips and tits, feather-soft curls on her head. Holy fuck, it worked.

Okay, okay, so—the countdown is on. Surveillance cameras in this hall just caught what looks like Natasha Romanoff in what looks like Captain America’s comic book uniform appearing out of thin air—she’d thought about hexing the cameras in the hall before starting, but everyone’s on high alert: a fault in the cameras would be investigated immediately and in force. So this way buys her a little more time, maybe—

Leap up—Christ on a bike, Romanoff’s muscle memory—elegant as a cat and stride over to the biometric scanner and slap her palm on the screen and lean in until the reader can find her eye and—and it beeps, flashes green, happy as a clam.

The door slides open and Steve strides through, hits the door seal button on the far side with her fist and—and through the gap as the door closes: SHIELD security rounding the corner, black uniforms and rifles and—Christ, that was fast.

Hiss of displaced air as the door closes. Grab for her dog tags, for the belt pouch with the anchor coins, quick deploy veil _go_ —

Get veiled, get Stevie shaped again— _oh-fuck-ouch_ , too fast, shrieking pain liquid down his spine and—and he rips down into his belly, into the well of fire in his pelvis, hauls out a fistful of the fire of unmaking and slaps his hands onto the doors.

The hex tears up and through him, burns like he’s slapped his hands on a stovetop—“Christ,” he hisses, and the door gives a tragic mechanical whine like a starving dog and then a hollow thump, steel jolting in the frame.

Okay: no one’s getting in that way, not for a few minutes, so—

So there’s time to—

He lurches over to the nearest corner and doubles over, hand to the wall. Heaves up everything in his gut, which—it’s a couple mouthfuls of bile, is all. He’s forgotten to eat again. Put it on the to-do list, somewhere after _stop lunatic father from ending the world as we know it_ —

That felt awful, Jesus Christ. It wasn’t—he’s changed his shape before, obviously. And he’s been a lady before. A lady wolf, or a lady whale, borrowing. So it wasn’t the—having _skirts and a sheath_ , as Ulfadhir put it, a million-some years ago. It was just—wrong. Felt like—like he’s gone through Romanoff’s underthings while she was sleeping, or something. Intrusive. Like he’s violated her, somehow.

And it’s over now. Thank God Almighty. Here’s hoping he just—never has to do that particular party trick again.

Spit to clear the taste of bile from his mouth. Straighten up and turn and—

It’s a huge grey open space and the cage is in the middle—glass, steel wrapped around like vast mechanical arms and inside—

Ulfadhir. Loki. Head cocked in his direction—not watching him, but aware of him just the same, somehow, through the veil.

Steve takes a breath. Puts hands to his chest and pulls his shit together and centres himself, deep breaths, just a few cycles, just until his hands stop shaking.

Okay, so: for his next trick. There are cameras in each corner of the room, unblinking electronic eyes—he can hear their songs, the mindless hum of electronic devices with an under-note of whispering, like the low-voiced hissing of gossips.

Breathe out. Lift hands. Close eyes and listen and pull up the fire, belly chest shoulders arms hands—

Pull, twist, _throw_. The cameras shit sparks. There’s a pained electric whine and the camera in the far corner falls off its mounting, blue-green flames licking over it. The sharp stench of burning plastic and wire hits the air.

Steve rolls his shoulders, rolls his wrists to shift the ache out—the bone-deep burn, too much sorcery, too quickly—and then walks down the steps to stand at the glass. Takes another breath. Drops his veil.

Ulfadhir smiles, bright and awful as sunrise over a concentration camp. “I did wonder how long it would take you to find a way in here.”

“Twenty-first century security measures are a shade tighter than what I’m used to working around,” Steve says. “I’m adapting, learning. An unpredictable enemy is a dangerous one.”

“It’s true, then. This is all new to you,” Ulfadhir says. “Barton told me they found you in the ice.”

“Yeah, that’s sixty-seven years I’m not getting back,” Steve says, hooking his thumbs over his belt. He can feel the anchor coin under the buckle with the tip of his left thumb. “Do you wanna talk about the weather now, or are we gonna talk about the invading army of aliens from outer space?”

“If I had known you were alive, I would have come for you,” Ulfadhir says.

Steve flinches, because—Christ, how many times did he dream of someone coming for him in the ice? Of Howard and Peggy cutting away the layers of ice with some clever machine, or his Da melting the ice away with a wave of one hand and pulling him up to the sunlight. Of Bucky or his Mam coming for his soul, spilling warmth and light into the pitch-black dark, wrapping him up and lifting him away from it all—

There’s a flayed-open wound down the centre of his soul that is shaped like a slab of pack-ice off the coast of fucking Greenland. And—

And Loki’s gone and stuck his fingers in that wound with the precision of a Goddamn mathematician, and neatly turned the conversation away from—

“You manipulative piece of shit,” Steve snarls, slams a hand into the glass. “Go screw yourself. You don’t get to talk about that.”

Ulfadhir blinks, rocks back on his heels, face going through some kinda complicated series of half-hidden expressions, of… surprise, confusion, dismay, which—

He doesn’t know. He’s imagining Steve slept seven decades away and awoke refreshed, same as everyone else does. He’s got no idea Steve was awake and screaming the whole fucking time.

“If you _ever_ gave a _shit_ about me,” Steve says, because he can be a manipulative asshole too: he learned from the best. “Then _talk_ to me. Da, please—I can’t sit this out, I can’t look away. If you lead a Goddamn army into this world and let ‘em loose, I will be in the very Goddamn middle of the shit storm. There has to be a way to stop this.”

“There is no stopping it. There is only the war,” Ulfadhir says, rasps out like he’s choking on it.

“Come _on_ , Da,” Steve says, and—and from behind him there’s a low-pitched thump, and then a buzzing whine like—Christ, SHIELD are cutting their way in through the door. This is taking too Goddamn long.

“Okay,” Steve says, leans his forehead against the glass. “Okay, so: you’re being compelled. It’s not a _geas_. But it’s gotta have some kinda _heft_ behind it because you’re a son of a bitch, but you’re not a pushover, so…”

The whine grinds on behind him, teeth-aching shrill. They made this chamber Hulk-proof, it’ll take them a few minutes but he needs to think _fast_ , needs to understand—

And he’s closed his eyes so—and all he can hear is the scream of metal teeth on plated steel, the clock ticking down, and past the whine there’s a—

—there’s—there’s the music, his own song and Ulfadhir’s, and the song of his chamber, metal-song and glass-song and the hum of electronics, the duller rumbling purr of mechanical parts, and beyond the door there’s a jumble of songs from the SHIELD agents, united into a single thrumming beat by their shared mission, shared focus, and beyond _that_ —

The song is _subtle_ , almost—it’s almost an absence of sound—it’s like—

A hundred-odd years ago Bucky and Steve were sitting on the fire escape at his Mam’s apartment—he remembers it was a swelteringly hot day, t-shirts glued to their frames with sweat—and Buck wasted twenty minutes trying to explain to Steve how astronomers back in the day found Neptune, and Pluto. Seems it wasn’t the actual planets they found, so much as the distortions in the orbits of other planets as they passed—Steve remembers Buck using his hands to mime planets passing each other in space, swaying to pull closer as they pass like magnets, like lovers.

And what Steve’s hearing now is like that: there are spider-threads, tugging at everything, pulling them outta shape just a shave, just enough that a circle becomes an oval, becomes—

It’s everywhere, now he’s listening for it: everywhere there is mind, awareness, the song is threaded into it, shifting and twisting and—

It’s woven into the songs of the agents outside the chamber, tugging and pushing. It’s thrumming—it’s within Ulfadhir’s song, pulling the ice flows into spikes and—

It’s in Steve’s song. It’s in him, oh _God_ , it’s—he’s being toyed with, he’s being _played_ , and how much—Jesus Christ. How many decisions has he made in the last day that weren’t twisted outta shape, ever so subtly—

“Oh, shit,” Steve says, and opens his eyes.

Ulfadhir is two feet away, on the other side of the glass, watching, studying, and—and he meets Steve’s eyes, holds for half a heartbeat, nods and—

And then grimaces, flinching back again like he’s caught a fist in the teeth, and when he rocks forward again he looks—dazed, clouded, and—and Steve can hear the _distortion,_ the spider-threads tugging harder at him, tugging at the ice flows in Ulfadhir’s song until they’re razor edged, until—his eyes clear.

“Stand with me, then,” he says. “Or watch your world _burn_.”

“Right,” Steve says, somewhere in the distance—mouth moving by rote, because he’s not talking to Ulfadhir anymore, he’s talking to the compulsion, to—the song. It’s been steering Ulfadhir from the start, and—and it’s here. This song—it’s got a source, there’s someone on this fucking helicarrier that’s—

Someone—no, fuck. Something.

The sceptre.

The one that’s smack-dab in the guts of the helicarrier, in the lab Stark and Banner are using as their base of operations—Jesus H. Christ.

“Oh,” Steve says. “It’s a con. Everyone’s looking at _you_ , and meanwhile—we’re all being manipulated into bickering like idiots and squinting suspiciously at each other, when the real threat is…”

Ulfadhir smiles, crooked. Leans close to the glass, his forearm pressed where Steve’s is—like a mirror image. “You call it manipulation? All I’ve done is scratch away at the lies and stage makeup that you’ve all drenched yourselves in. There’s not one of you that isn’t a _monster_ underneath.”

And Steve—twitches, closes down hard so Loki can’t see—fuck, that punch landed a little too close to centre mass, and Steve’s closed his eyes, his inhuman wolf eyes, closed his mouth so his fangs don’t show, but—

But—but that was—of all the ways he coulda phrased that, that was—

_Monster_. He said _monster_ , of all the words he coulda—

—oh shit, Banner. The plan is _Banner_ , and—

Behind Steve, the whine stops, and then— _thud_.

Jesus, Mary and Jospeh—they’re almost through.

Steve blinks, looks up, meets Ulfadhir’s eyes again: pale and crazed with pain and misery and—“Roger that,” Steve says.

Ulfadhir’s mouth twitches—the faintest ghost of a smile, or—and then he steps back from the glass and—

—and vanishes.

Steve takes a breath and shuts his eyes to listen and—and he’s not… He doesn’t hear Ulfadhir’s song. He doesn’t hear a veil, the muted white noise hum. Which—which doesn’t make sense, he can’t have—

Unless—

He’s gone. He’s not under a veil but he’s not in the box now which—oh _God_.

Was he ever even _in_ the fucking box? Has Steve—has _everyone_ —been talking to a seeming the whole time—a really Goddamn solid seeming, with enough of his presence and music woven in— _bilocation_. Which means—

Which means Loki’s loose somewhere in the helicarrier. Has been for—God knows how long, maybe hours.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, what a clusterfuck.

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” Steve yells, and then—

And then there’s a hollow _boom_ behind him and he whips a hand into his belt pouch and throws out a quick-deploy veil and—and _hidden_ , and—they’ve cut a gap in the door and there’s SHIELD personnel pouring in, rifles up and scanning the chamber, fanning out and around.

Okay, so—one disaster at a time, Steve’s gotta just—fucking centre his shit and deal with one disaster at a time, which—getting outta here. Step one: get outta here. He flows back up the steps, ducks under a rifle as a guy pivots, weaves around the next guy and—and pastes himself to the wall to get past the next guy, shit that was too close and then—

He’s almost back to the door when Agent Coulson comes through, tac vest over his suit, clear-eyed and gun down and hand already to the comms piece in his ear. “Loki’s outta the cage, boss.” Heartbeat pause, and then: “Or—or I think he is—he might be using some kinda Asgardian high strangeness to make himself invisible right now. Thermal—right. Sawyer, we need thermal imaging in here… Doesn’t matter, the nearest piece of tac gear with thermal imaging capability—”

—and Steve’s weaving past the last guy and out, twisting to squeeze through the gap in the door past the young guy standing guard—squeeze past close enough to count the hairs in his baby’s-first-moustache. Not sticking around long enough to find out if his veils are good enough to fool thermal imaging.

Okay, next disaster—Ulfadhir is— _no_ , come on, focus up. The sceptre is next, has to be next: because no one is thinking with their upstairs brains right now, and it’s the fucking sceptre doing it, somehow.

Steve points his nose towards the lab and marches. He needs to be there yesterday, and—the helicarrier is awake: there are SHIELD soldiers, same black tac gear and rifles, patrolling the corridors now, anchored at key intersections. They’ve figured out the kind of threat Ulfadhir represents, and it’s only three hours too late.

It was stupid—unforgivably fucking stupid—that Steve’s let Ulfadhir— _Loki_ —distract him for this long. It’s the game of great houses, it’s sorcery, it’s sleight of hand and he’s been staring at the blind like an idiot. Christ only knows where Loki really is—somewhere on the carrier, he’s gone to enough trouble to get on here. But—

But Loki is a Trojan horse: he came bearing the sceptre. And Steve can hear the thing singing from half the carrier away, and it’s song is—

Spider web threads. Tendrils of mist. Winding and slipping, coiling into everyone around it and pulling, distorting, shifting shapes just slightly, subtle enough that you wouldn’t see it unless you were—watching. Listening. Paying attention. Stupid, stupid—

He stops in the shelter of a doorframe and wraps a seeming of Cap around himself—there are enough people in the corridors now that the risk of someone stepping on his invisible ass is real. Walks swift and calm and contained—there’s a special kind of illusion conjured by just walking purposefully, one that gets people out of your way and prevents them asking awkward questions—and then—

An alarm shrieks, piercing and harsh, the lights overhead flashing to red and he almost disappears himself, flinches right off the visible spectrum but—but it’s not directed at him, it’s ship wide: “Attention all personnel: the fox is in the henhouse. Initiate pod person protocol.”

“What the Hell is the pod person protocol?” Steve asks no one in particular, and an engineer slows, pulling the pistol from the back of his jumpsuit.

“Means we have to check for infiltrators,” the engineer answers, and then stops, looks closer at Steve: “So: are you really Captain America?”

_Fuck me_. “Son, just don’t,” Steve says, projecting all the authority he can—and never mind that he’s _not_ Cap, not right now, and never mind that this guy’s twice Steve’s apparent age: he blinks, nods, moves on to his assignment, and Steve rubs at his heart under the seeming where it’s pulling tight like a stone in his chest.

Christ: this is not a good time to be moving around under an illusion. But he needs his magic. Needs it more than any other weapon in his arsenal. He can hear the sceptre, singing louder and more vibrant now, like it knows the plan has changed. Like it’s aware.

The plan, as near as Steve can figure it—he hits a service ladder and starts climbing, not getting caught in a lift if he can avoid it—Loki’s plan: get on the helicarrier. Get in everyone’s heads, get ‘em all fighting each other, watching each other. Divide and conquer before any meaningful resistance to the invasion gets started.

And then Banner, somehow—something happens to flip his switch, and maybe it’s the sceptre or maybe it’s not that subtle but—something flips the poor asshole’s crazy switch, and the Hulk rips this Goddamn ship apart from the inside.

So—outta the service shaft and back into the corridors, and he’s close enough to the lab now that—the sceptre. It knows he’s coming, somehow it knows he’s coming and it’s… pushing, somehow, leaning against him like he’s walking into the wind.

And he’s nearly there and he’s gotta—it’s not touching his body, he’s distantly aware of that much: that his body is moving as smooth as ever, just—slow, so Goddamn slow, because the closer he gets the louder it gets and—

And it’s a screaming mindless fear. It’s all the self-loathing Steve’s ever felt piling on all at once. It’s the horror of the endless black inside the ice. It’s the permanently wolf-shaped part of his mind, wounded and biting, snarling. It’s his Mam’s funeral—Christ, he can smell the incense, the mothball reek from his shitty suit—it’s—

It’s watching Bucky fall from the train, a brown and white and blue shape disappearing into the white-grey of the ravine, the howl of the ice-whip wind and the mechanical wail of the train on the tracks and he can still hear Buck past it, screaming, screaming—

Stopped. Stopped dead in the corridor like an asshole, and he’s bit his lip hard enough to bleed it so no one hears the keen rising up from his belly like cholera in floodwater, and—if he takes another step, Bucky will die.

Shaking, he’s shaking like a dead leaf on the twig and—thank Christ no one can see him, just the Cap-seeming stalled ponderously in the middle of the walkway—and whining soft and steady, helpless wounded sound spilling outta him like vomit because—

_Fuck you. Fuck you, you malign fucking thing—_

Take a step, and—and Buck falls, and his leg clips the rock of the cliff face as he falls, flesh shredding open and the white of bone bared and streamers of red trail after him—

Take another step. Buck falls, and he lands in powder and survives long enough for the wolves to come, and he’s still alive when they start to tear at the skin of his arms and belly and—

Fuck you _, you evil piece of shit, you’re a Goddamn_ stick _with a Christmas light on the top, you don’t get to do this, you don’t get to_ —

He’s started humming, and—another step, and it throws another horror at him and he hums louder—it’s Bucky’s song, Irish ballad by way of a jazz band, and Steve’s Mam’s seashore crooning is in there, and there are bars of Peggy’s piano song woven in—

Another step. Another horror—pink ropes of intestine coiled over bare rock and the white of Bucky’s ribcage open to the sky and—and Steve opens his mouth and starts singing, like some kinda fucking crazy person, digs in his belt pouch for a quick-deploy veil and muffles the noise because there is no good explanation for why Captain America is howling a wordless tune in the helicarrier corridor and—

Another step. The horror swims up his throat and it’s all he can do not to vomit, but—singing louder, and there are threads from the Commandos in there now, a couple bars from each of them, and then he’s started singing Winnie Barnes’ lilting song—two parts fiddle and one part the ringing tone of a smith’s hammer—and he’s—

The door. The door to the lab. It’s stood open, and—

Step inside. The horror and fear and loathing put claws in, hard enough he can just about feel ‘em pressed against his skin from the inside, but—the rest of the team are all in here. Fury, Stark and Banner are stood at one of the monitors—Stark is pointing with that electric probe thing again—and Romanoff is in a corner with Agent Hill, looking at another monitor, and Thor is watching, arms crossed and brow down hard and—and it’s a mess, a clusterfuck, everyone talking at once, yelling and gesturing—

“I’d like to know why SHIELD is using the cube to make weapons of mass destruction,” Banner snaps, ripping his glasses off, and—

“This doesn’t look much like a green energy project,” Stark says, poking at the schematics on the screen—Christ, that looks like some kinda energy rifle—

“It’s not me,” Romanoff is saying to Hill. She’s bled white, lips pinched into a line. “It’s a trick. This is Loki, you know I’m not—it’s _not me_ ,” and Steve slows for half a step because—shit, that’s on him: he used Romanoff’s face to get at Loki’s cage and now—but there’s no time, he’s gotta stay on task.

The sceptre is still on the work bench, blue light of the jewel on the end winking like a watchful eye. He’s—he’s there, he’s made it, and now he’s gotta—touch the fucking thing, and it’s making his skin twitch like it wants to ooze straight off his bones. God Almighty, okay, here goes—

Grabs the sceptre. Throws up in his mouth. Swallows hard.

_Fuck you,_ glow stick of destiny _, in earnest: fuck you so hard._

Turns and walks straight back outta the lab, and they’re all too busy yelling to even notice the sceptre vanish.

Back out in the corridor, and—nearest way up is down the corridor, another service shaft, and—and he’s still singing, cycled back to Bucky’s song again, loud and angry and ricocheting around in the metal tube of the ladder shaft, because this hateful Goddamn thing is—it’s still sending him horrors—

—Buck’s staring eyes being pecked out by crows, his Mam coughing up palmful gobs of blood and lung tissue in an empty room and no one comes in to help her—

—and now there’s an ache radiating up his arm, the skin of his palm where he’s holding the sceptre stinging like sunburn and—it’s in his head. It’s just in his head, he’s knows it can’t touch him, not really, but—but Christ that’s starting to sting.

Out of the service shaft—clawing with his spare hand for purchase on the floor, and he’s panting, retching in between phrases of pissed-off singing, and his face is wet with tears and it hurts, _Jesus_ , it really hurts—

Up, on your feet. Staggering down the last stretch of corridor to the airlock, to the sealed door out and—

It doesn’t require biometric access—thank _fuck_ , thank Mother Mary and Jesus Christ—and he’s mashing at the button with his fist, graceful as a dying muskox, lurching through the door as it slides open and up to the next lock. More mashing at the button—Christ, please, come on—

Opens to the howl of wind, the screaming cold of clear open air at 40,000 feet sucking at him—hair, legs, lungs.

Last stretch. Drops to his knees and claws his fingers into the asphalt of the flight deck and crawls, burning-cold pain lancing up from the sceptre, through his hand, arm, into his chest, his heart.

_Crawl, you son of a bitch, come on_ —fingertips hit metal links. One of the industrial chains for holding jets secured on deck. Hang onto the chain—he’s getting closer to the edge, closer to the clear blue nothing off the edge of the world, and the wind is shrieking so loud he can’t hear himself sobbing past it, ripping at his bare skin with razor-cold fingertips.

And—and the edge. Edge of the helicarrier. Edge of the world.

He’s flat on his belly now, clinging to the chain with his spare hand like a sinner clinging to the promise of redemption. If he gives the wind any purchase at all, it’ll suck him straight off the edge, and Jesus H. Christ it’s a long way down.

The sceptre—hand is shaking so hard it’s like a seizure. Lift it and hold it out and—Christ, it’s burned him so deep it’s welded to his bones and he can’t, can’t let it go, can’t—

_Ave-Maria-gratia-plena-Mam-please-God-oh-Buck—_

Lets it go.


	4. Chapter 4

There’s a heartbeat of still quiet nothing, after Steve drops the sceptre off the edge of the helicarrier, and then—

And then the despair hits, the horror of—oh God, he’s fucked this. Everyone on this ship is gonna die, a sinking anguish that lances down into his gut and spills like rank slick pus from a wound and he can hear himself moaning like a wounded ox, teeth cutting into his lips where he’s smashed his face into the asphalt and then—

And then gone. Gone like the wicked fairies under the bed, the very second his Mam walked into the room, gone like—like the pain in his hand and arm where he’s been touching the sceptre, the soul-searing burn that he coulda sworn was gonna strip the skin and muscle from his bone but—gone.

_A clever lie, well-crafted, is an illusion spun inside a man’s mind_. There isn’t even a mark on his palm—smear of a rash on his knuckles, from crawling over the asphalt.

Thank Christ, thank _fuck_ —it’s done. Gone and done and—last Steve checked the helicarrier was parked someplace over the Atlantic Ocean, which means right now the sceptre is probably sinking like a stone into the deep blue, annoying the shit outta some fish but otherwise—checkmate.

And it’s far the Hell away, far enough away its spell can’t reach any more. The insidious subtle bullshit mind games, the paranoia and surging pulses of fear and anger that have been riding Steve all day like a monkey on his back, riding _everyone_. The manipulation—

Loki. Loki is still on the helicarrier, on the loose and veiled and still an active threat. And—and Dr Banner, the poor bastard—if Ulfadhir’s plan is to bring out Banner’s green giant, turn him loose in the belly of the ship, then—Steve is not gonna win a fist fight with the Hulk. No chance in Hell, so… An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, Steve’s Mam always used to say, right before she’d force him to eat liver for dinner.

Banner. Lab. Enough laying around, Rogers.

Scrapes himself up and— _shit oh dear_ that’s a long way down—crab-crawls away from the edge of the carrier, from the screaming suck of the wind and open air. Back inside the helicarrier. Next crisis, _go_.

 

*******

 

Steve’s got his shield in hand and he’s wrapped in a Cap seeming when he walks back into the lab—no one is yelling, but there’s still a pulled-tautness in the air, in the lines of bodies, and Romanoff is still stood next to Hill, handcuffs around her wrists, and—

“And where the Hell have you been?” Fury asks.

Steve’s had the walk down from the flight deck to prepare his answer: “Looking for Loki,” he says, crisp as the first lick of snow, and it’s at least 40% the truth, and then the deflection—“Whose brilliant Goddamn plan was it to put the otherworldly sorcerer in a glass box and imagine that was gonna hold him?”

“Clearly we underestimated his capabilities,” Fury says, looking exactly like he’s bit into a lemon. “And the capabilities of his allies.”

“We have evidence there may be a second magic-user helping him,” Hill says.

And thank _Christ_ they’re all looking at the seeming, at Cap’s heroic eyebrows and jawline, looking stoic and constipated as usual, because Steve’s got no fucking control over what his real face is doing: there’s a twitch, his mouth pulling down and open, like he’s gonna shriek or laugh or sob.

Jesus, he’s been out of the ice and walking around for just on a Goddamn week in the 21st century and already he’s so close to screwing the pooch for good. So close to _burned_ , so close to—

He won’t go down without a fight, if it comes to it. Won’t let them put him in his own glass box to be vivisected and studied down to the cells, to the not-quite-human DNA. He’ll disappear and go live with the wolves in fucking Greenland again.

Heartbeat pause—okay, say something, anything: “That complicates the situation,” Steve says. “We got any idea who it is?”

“It could be any of a dozen rogue sorcerers or witches of Loki’s acquaintance,” Thor says. “His thirst for knowledge always took him far afield—”

“This is fascinating—I’m _fascinated_ ,” Stark says, cuts across. “And I’m also still ruminating on why SHIELD decided to directly follow the Hydra world domination model and use the Tesseract to make WMDs. Didn’t we agree—they were the bad guys, right? There was a World War or something about it, Cap was there—”

It’s reassuring that Stark is still an asshole even without the sceptre’s influence.

“Because the world is filling up with people that can’t be matched, can’t be controlled,” Fury says, and Steve moves deeper into the lab, over to—Banner is stood at one of the far work stations, the bench between himself and the rest of the room, as separate as he could make himself without walking outta the room.

He’s watching Fury speak, blunt fingers working over the knuckles of his other hand and his mouth a flat line—he’s gotta know that he’s one of those people that can’t be matched, or controlled.

And so is Steve.

“And because it’s not enough to just worry about this world, anymore: we had a visitor from another planet last year, and now there’s a smouldering ruin where a small town in New Mexico used to be,” Fury says. “Not only are we not alone, but we are hopelessly, hilariously outgunned.”

Steve fetches up next to Banner’s bench and drops into a lean against it, shield hanging by the straps from his fingers and arms crossed and one leg cocked, keeping his movements smooth, casual. If Loki’s still planning to make a run at Banner, he’ll need to get past Steve, and—and he’s listening hard but there’s no trace of his Da’s song, veiled or otherwise.

“I grieve that my coming to Midgard cost your people so dearly,” Thor says. “But Asgard seeks nothing but peace and protection for your realm.”

“Asgard may not be a threat, but the Chitauri sure as Hell are,” Fury says, and—

And the computer at Banner’s work station starts beeping, loud and shrill.

There’s a second’s pause, everyone turning and flinching, startled, and then: “Got it,” Stark says.

Christ, that’s right: they’ve been tracking the cube. Steve’s been so busy putting out Goddamn fires right here he kind of forgot about that half of the shit sandwich.

“Oh—” Banner says, staring at the screen, fixed and bleeding pale, and then, louder: “Oh my God, _guys—_ ” and then—

And then there’s a _jolt_ like you’re drunk and coming down the stairs in the dark and you’ve missed the count and the last stair’s not there and—

_Banner_ —Steve has time to—Loki wants him green and raging and opening up this ship like a can of sardines, so—Steve’s moving, lunging, arms out to catch the guy up and—

The explosion—roar like ten shells close range all at once, and you’re stuck in a trench keeping your head down and hoping to Christ that it passes and—and the _jolt_ turns into a _heave_ like a huge child has taken up the helicarrier in clumsy hands and _shaken_ and—

—and the fucking _floor_ has gone out from under them and Steve’s crushing Banner to his skinny chest and—

Sometime seventy or eighty or six hundred years ago, Ulfadhir and Bucky and Peggy all spent a lotta time teaching Steve how to fall right. You learn how to fight, you learn how to fall.

Falling, he’s good at. This is kind of fucking nostalgic.

Just—just get enough spin to—

_Crunch_ of landing, on their sides and spooned together like pill bugs and Steve’s got his shield up overhead, makeshift shelter, chunks of steel and lab equipment raining down and sheering off the vibranium like water off a waxed coat—

—and silence, a half-heartbeat and Banner’s eyes are squeezed closed—thank fuck, thank God, Steve’s seeming is in tatters—heaves himself back, gets enough room for Jesus between them, gropes in his belt with his spare hand and hauls out a Cap-sized illusion. Hides himself again before Banner gets a look at his wolf eyes, his less-than-human face.

Hope to Christ he was too busy shitting his pants to _notice my skinny ass cuddling him as we fell._

“You feeling Irish?” Steve asks—yells, probably, past the ringing wail in his ears, half-deaf again.

Banner blinks his eyes open. Gives the question a second to sink in and down, through the layers of rubble and screaming alarm klaxons overhead and—“No,” he rasps. “Still in the pink. Nice catch.”

“Pink is good,” Steve says, lowers his shield and gets up—the Cap seeming looks a lot more acrobatic about it than the real Steve does, leaning on the rim of his shield and wheezing for a second. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

“Okay down there?” comes from overhead and—it’s Romanoff, red curls tattered and a sooty smudge across her chin, her hands unbound, peering down at them through the hole where the floor used to be. They’ve only fallen one level, thank Christ.

“We’re okay,” Banner calls back, and his gaze meets Steve’s—meets the eyes of his seeming anyway, somewhere up over Steve’s head—and _fuck_. That was too close. That woulda been bad, only—

Only there’s a low swooping feeling in Steve’s gut that is an awful kind of familiar, the world pressing up and gravity pressing down and—

“This doesn’t feel like a planned descent,” Banner says.

“One of the engines was hit—some kinda external detonation. And Loki’s still MIA,” Romanoff calls down. “We’re in trouble, fellas.”

Steve fishes into a belt pouch and pulls out his comms earpiece. Looks at Banner. “Know anything about repairing helicarrier engines?”

“Now seems like a good time to learn,” Banner says.

 

*******

 

Steve being a neurotic son of a bitch pays off— _sorcerers have a reputation for omniscience_ , Ulfadhir said in a lesson, eighty-something years ago, _and it’s nothing to do with power and everything to do with advance planning_ —and he can get Banner to the downed engine through the bowels of the helicarrier, service tunnels and winding corridors he’d noted while he was exploring in his Cap shape, eidetic memory and all.

Stark is already there, suited up flying and tearing at the shredded chunks of metal with armoured hands and yelling instructions at a couple of SHIELD techs in jumpsuits.

“Oh, thank Tesla! Someone who speaks English,” he barks, when Steve and Banner get there. “I need you at that engine control panel to tell me which relays are in overload position.”

“Uh, small problem,” Banner says, gazing at—oh, must be the control panel Stark’s talking about, and it’s two floors up and on the other side of a ten foot gap where the engine housing used to be, and there’s a whole lotta fresh air and not much else to break your fall down there.

“Okay, sweetheart, gimme some sugar,” Stark answers, and a heartbeat later Stark’s got Banner in a gleaming metal bridal carry—Steve hears a strangled yelp—and then he’s deposited safely next to the control panel, staggering, and Stark’s off again like a huge firefly with some kinda attention disorder.

“You got this?” Steve yells across the gap, words sucked away by the howling of the wind, and Banner throws him a shaky thumbs up and hauls open the panel door and—

“Found ‘em,” Romanoff is saying over the comms, whisper close like she’s stood just behind Steve’s right ear. “Perimeter breech is on A deck, sector nine—they’re coming in through the vents, SHIELD gear.” Sucked in breath, heartbeat pause and then: “Agent Barton is here.”

Here is the plan, once the shit hits the fan, spun from sugar and desperation and immediate need: Banner and Stark make repairs to engine three, get the helicarrier levelled out. Thor was gone the second the explosion hit, he’s searching for Loki, which—God speed, pal, but Steve doesn’t like his chances. Romanoff—

“The engine explosion was external, which means an incursion force,” she said over the comms, as Steve was leading Banner through a service corridor and—“Which means Barton. There’s no one else with the know-how to take this thing outta the sky. I know how he thinks, I’ll find them,” and sure enough—

Sure enough Steve’s hearing gunfire over the comms and: “I’ve engaged,” Romanoff says, laconic.

Christ on a crutch. “I’m coming,” Steve says, and fucking _runs_.

Back up the corridor and—service ladder, up, _go_ —he’s Stevie shaped, can’t hit super solider speeds, but he needs his sorcery with Loki only God know where so—up and up, three floors to A deck and haul ass off the ladder, feet on the deck, _go_. Runs down the length of the carrier, bare feet slapping on the metal floor—the Cap shaped seeming looks much more heroic about it—

And rounds a corner and Romanoff is swinging off a panel in the ceiling, feet extended, catches a guy clean in the jaw and—

There’s ballpark fifteen guys in the corridor, SHIELD body armour and rifles and she’s right in the middle of ‘em, close range, and they can’t shoot at her without hitting each other which means—

Target rich environment.

She’s fast as a snake, arcing like lightning—kicks, both feet, falls back and catches herself on her hands and twists and now she’s got her legs around the next guy’s hips and he’s falling and she’s rolling across him, striking throat and eyes, comes up with a knee in the next guy’s gut and—

Okay, time to—

Steve—he can do this in his sleep but it’s always in his Cap shape, not—he’s not trained like this—hefts the shield up and throws, hard, twists to put his whole puny body behind it and—

Two guys go down, shield edge to the head, and a third asshole gets the final shield rebound in the throat and is staggering, clutching at his neck and—

Steve runs, plants a bare foot on the guy’s half-bent knee and jumps and—bony elbow square in the face, nose cartilage shattering, and then he’s falling and Steve’s snatching his rifle and falling with him, his Cap-seeming unravelling around him.

Target rich environment—“Romanoff, _krysha_ ,” Steve yells, and a heartbeat later she’s slapping a tiny electric bug onto a guy’s neck and he’s convulsing and falling back and she’s climbing him like a ladder and leaping— _parkour, it’s a sport_ —and catching a ceiling panel again, legs curling up to brace—

Steve levels the rifle at knee height and opens up.

Thirty-ish rounds in a magazine—Steve hasn’t used this model before, doesn’t know the magic number—minus however many the guy fired before Steve repossessed the rifle, and it’s set to fire in three-bullet bursts so _fuck accuracy_ and just point and pray and squeeze the trigger and they drop like Goddamn flies, blood and white shards of bone spitting out from where his shots are landing, shins and knees and thighs.

This is a stealth incursion, which means only light armour below the hips, and they’re all looking at Romanoff, scrabbling after her—no one is even looking Steve’s way. It’s unfair, it’s almost cheating but—in war, the cheaters win.

And then the magazine clicks empty—twenty-seven bullets—and there’s one asshole left standing, reeling around, drawing a bead on Steve and—

And Romanoff drops on him, spider from her web, thighs choking tight around the guy’s neck and heaving her full weight into it and he goes down, bone-breaking _crunch_ , still.

There’s half a second of stunned silence. Steve ditches the rifle and snakes a hand into his belt pouch and whips out another Cap-seeming, gets hidden. Last one—he’s going through ‘em too quick, like they’re penny candy. Needs a second to breathe and cast some more anchors, but he’s not getting a Goddamn second anytime soon.

And then the stunned silence breaks and someone starts moaning, and someone else hitches a wet breath and screams, dumb animal noise of anguish, and there’s the thump of helmet against metal as one of ‘em writhes.

From the middle of the scattered constellation of fallen soldiers Natasha Romanoff bounces to her feet, lithe as a cat. Coils her leg and kicks and—there’s a _thump_ and the screaming cuts out.

“There’s more of ‘em, heading for sector seven,” Romanoff says, breathless, hand to her comms unit. There’s blood running down her right arm—looks like a bullet graze. “And Barton got away—think he was heading for the bridge.”

“Go after Barton,” Steve says, climbing up—fuck, his old bones are aching, like he’s bruised his… everything. “I’ll pick up the spares.”

“Got it,” she says, and is gone, a lean black blade cutting for the front of the carrier.

Steve waits ’til she’s disappeared outta sight down a branch in the corridor before he leans against the wall and puts his head back and sags like a neglected house plant, just for a second, just—he’s shaking down both arms, a fine tremor starting in his hands and creeping up into his shoulders like the vibration of the rifle, of metal and plastic and fire, is contagious. He’s burning the candle at both ends, his physical reserves and the fires of making and unmaking, but—

But Loki’s still out there somewhere, in here somewhere, up to God knows what—

Loki. Loki’s plan. Banner.

Sector seven is where the third engine is located.

“Oh Christ,” Steve says. Hauls his carcass up and moves out.

 

*******

 

Steve gets halfway back to the damaged engine when—

The corridor is half-blocked with SHIELD personnel—the real deal, a couple agents with combat gear and guns drawn plus a half dozen technicians in coveralls: a couple have pistols, one has what looks like a flare gun and one big guy has a fucking axe. They’re all backs turned, watching—

Watching Thor, Son of Odin, slam a goon in black armour face-first into the wall with one hand—helmet shatters with a bright _crack_ , shards of black polymer spilling and—and he’s knee-deep in sprawled bodies, black armour and limbs on ugly angles and—

Okay, so that problem has solved itself.

“ _She-iiit_ ,” one of the technicians sings, and Thor lets the goon drop—limp crumple to the floor like an overcooked strand of spaghetti.

Thor looks up, meets Steve’s stare and nods, regal, and Steve hefts his shield and slips past the peanut gallery.

“I guess you haven’t found Loki and put him back in the box,” Steve says.

“You’d guess aright,” Thor says. “These are allies of his?”

Or enemies of SHIELD’s—functionally the same thing, right now—“Yeah,” Steve says, and—

The world lurches and heaves like a boat on an unforgiving sea and then—levels, and—

The feeling that everything is tilted like a drunk lurching home from the bar, the gravity-tug fluttering low in Steve’s gut: they’re gone.

Engine three is back online. Stark and Banner got it working. This is—

This is too easy.

This is—these are _pawns_ , they’re _nobody_. They’re a noisy distraction. And sure, Steve kicked the spokes outta Loki’s plan when he launched the sceptre off the side of the ship and kept Banner in the pink, but he’s not deluded enough to think that was Loki’s only plan. There’s more’n one way to skin a cat.

This is too easy, which means Loki hasn’t made his real play yet—or he’s already _made it_ while everyone was looking the other way, a stage magician waving a handkerchief about with his right while his left hand palms the rabbit. And Steve’s been chasing mercenaries around like some kinda idiot.

“I must find Loki,” Thor says, brow down—he’s clearly on the same page as Steve. Goes to give Steve a manly clap on the arm which—casual shift and lift his arm just a little so the shield catches it—not today, pal—and then he’s striding off again, back up the corridor past Steve, calling out: “Brother! It’s not too late to stop this, together…”

“Okay,” Steve says, and—

Time to quit fucking around.

Look around and—still some milling SHIELD personnel, using zip-tie cables to cuff the downed mercenaries. Fine, okay: Steve hefts his shield and moves, rounds a corner and moves up the corridor and finds another corner.

Privacy: no one coming or going down this way. Looks like a service corridor, less traffic down this way. He pastes himself to the wall, wedged in the corner, drops to sit on his heels. Okay.

Quick veil working, and anchor it to the walls either side of him. Disperse the Cap seeming, because he needs to fucking concentrate for this and he’s done parading in the puppet show. Jams the edge of his shield in a ridge in the metal floor, nests his hands on the shield strap and drops his head on his hands and _breathes_ and _centres his shit_ and—

He’s done this before. Once. By accident. Which means it’s possible, means he can do it again. Last time it was because he was being fucked senseless by one J.B. Barnes, which is—not a circumstance Steve can reproduce right now. But then he’s had an Imperial fuck tonne of experience at being out of his body between then and now—who knew being trapped in ice for seventy years could be useful life experience—so, maybe…

He can only try. He has to try: there is no time for him to walk every level of this Goddamn boat listening out for Ulfadhir’s song and hoping for the best. Lord, please: this has to work.

Breathe. Centre. Leave the body behind and—

He floats up, loosened from the anchor of flesh and bone like a helium balloon slipping free of a child’s hand. Looks back at his body, folded up small behind the shield, top of his head and mess of dark blonde hair visible—Jesus, he needs a haircut—and then looks front again before he can start getting drawn back to his meat suit. He’s made it this far.

What was the next step in the plan again, Rogers?

When he—when he was in the ice he would _go wide_ , sometimes: diffuse his concentration out and through the veins in the ice, veins of air and water, the places where ice had fractured decades or centuries ago and now ground against itself slow and ponderous as mountains walking. So what if he just—loosens his edges now, goes wide…

Nothing, is what happens. Fuck.

Okay, what if—

It happens fast as thought—he leans into the far wall, into metal and—and beyond the metal there are pipes, copper and plastic wiring, and cables and he’s bleeding into them, spilling out through the veins and arteries. He’s a drop of dye spilled into milk, spreading like a stain in all—it’s not _all directions_ , there’s no such thing as up and down and left and right. There are the pipes, shifting gas and water like veins, and the wires sparking and humming like nerves, the steel and titanium of bones, metal plating and asphalt of skin and—

And people, moving within this awareness, tiny beats of song and awareness within the vastness of the helicarrier, her own titanic song—humming electricity and the moan of metal shifting and the predatory pulsing beat of war, of weapons, and beyond sky, the howling tidal currents of wind and—

And there’s a pulsing throb of pain in the carrier’s song, one of her beating hearts still bleeding smoke from—from the explosion, there was—an explosion, an attack, this awareness needs to—

—needs to—remember. Something. They are supposed to be—

_Engine_. It’s an _engine_ , not a heart, it’s—

— _Steve_.

Steven Grant Rogers, _Stevie_ , sorcerer, soldier, assassin, ice-born, wolf kin. Captain Fucking America—Jesus, he’d almost forgot, almost slipped so wide and spread himself so thin he disappeared.

God Almighty— _Pater noster, qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum_. Okay, shit, right.

Back on task. Gotta find—

There are hundreds of songs within the sprawl of this awareness—of _his_ awareness: he hears shreds of punk music, of fireworks battering against the night sky, of birdsong, of some kinda African drum, violin sobbing and bees humming and it’s a cacophony, a symphony of hundreds of musicians all playing a different song, and sometimes they harmonise and sometimes they clash so wildly it hurts his—his awareness, the chariot of his consciousness.

Piano, rippling music of piano and the distant wail like a kettle boiling and the cracking punctuation of gunfire: Romanoff, and he narrows in because her song is _fast_ , surging along urgently like—like she’s fighting for her life. It’s Barton, Steve remembers his face from the file, blond and lean and fast as a greased mongoose as he blocks her strike and counters with a blade in his hand and—

And stay on fucking task, Rogers. He’s gotta find—

Ice crackling, fire spitting, steady pulsing rhythm of—Ulfadhir, it’s—it’s Loki.

He’s veiled, his song muffled under a layer of marshmallow, prowling through the bowels of the helicarrier towards—

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Steve slurs like a drunk, clawing his way back into his body and lurching forward, half falling, feet and elbows and head and heart all tuned to different wavelengths, getting different orders, and—staggers, leans a hand on the wall and hauls himself up, catches his shield strap up in numb fingers. Points himself toward sector seven.

Gropes around in the jumble of his head for a thread of—walking veil, there. Not his best, but it’ll do.

_Go_.

 

*******

 

He gets there just in time to watch it fucking happen.

He’s rounding a corner and it’s laid out before him like the opening scene of a play, boxy grey metal space with a SHIELD engineer laid out on the floor and Banner knelt over him, steady hands holding what looks like someone’s wadded up coveralls to a bullet wound in the guy’s thigh. Stark is stood beyond him, helmet visor up and talking to another SHIELD technician—lots of poking and pointing and sketching out design elements in the air. There’s a couple of mercenaries sprawled on the floor against the far wall, dead or KO’ed.

Crisis averted, engine fixed, all’s well that ends well and—

—and Ulfadhir’s song _lifts_ , a great triumphant _surge_ and—

“No,” Steve yells, and Ulfadhir drops the veil, stands unveiled over Banner’s curved back. Grins like a man with a mouthful of blood, manic, feral.

Pulls a stiletto blade from his coat and stabs Banner in the side, clean and smooth as a surgeon. _Here, let me show you—here. Between the third and fourth rib: you’ll find the heart without fail_ —

Banner makes a punched-out grunting sound, high and broken. His face bleeds white as whey, and then—and then a sick blush of green spills over his skin like spreading rot.

“Oh, shit,” Stark says, and then Banner is falling back—throwing himself away from the injured tech—and Loki is palming the knife and whirling to run and—

Surge of the music as he weaves a spell, and Stark claps his visor down and lifts his hand and puts a repulsor blast square through the chest of Loki—of his seeming, flashing green and then dissolving into ribbons, and—and the far door slides open and no one is there.

“Son of a bitch,” Steve yells again—still wrapped up in a walking veil, no one looking his way—they’re all looking at the place where Loki’s seeming used to be, or at Banner, who— _fuck_.

Banner is writhing, flesh bleeding green, moaning like a wounded animal, tearing sound of muscle fibres shredding and knitting again fast as— _shit_. As fast as when Steve forces a shape change through. And that hurts like buggery, and he’s—it’s nowhere _like_ what Banner goes through, the poor bastard—

Later.

Loki, deal with Loki first. Before he stabs any other asshole.

Steve drops his shield and runs, leaps clean across the fallen engineer—he’s scrabbling, trying to haul himself outta the way—and across to the open door on the far side, navigating by ear because he can _hear it_ , Loki’s song, muffled by the veil but still—

Through the door and the howl of the wind kicks up—leads into a service corridor, and down the end there’s a door sliding open and there’s nothing on the other side—leads out to the engine housing, to where the engine housing used to be. Fresh fucking air, now, and trailing wires and chunks of torn steel girder and Steve runs that way, towards the howl of the wind and the door that’s opening by itself.

Gets to the doorway and Loki is perched in a crouch on the end of one of the girders, hands wrapped around the warped steel and his tunic writhing in the suck and pull of the wind. He’s twisted to look back at Steve, grinning.

Lets go with one hand and gives Steve the saltiest Goddamn salute he’s ever seen—and Jim Morita used to salute with his middle finger up when he thought Steve was talkin’ outta his ass, so that’s saying something—and then—

Lets go with the other hand and falls.

“Go _screw yourself_ ,” Steve howls into the wind—he can hear the twist and shift of the music, a spell working, and then there’s a hawk soaring away, brown and black against the clear sky.

“ _Christ_ ,” Steve yells, and then slaps the door-close button to seal the engine bay off again and the wind cuts out and—

There’s an unearthly roar from behind him and—fuck. Oh fuck, Banner.

Backtracking, fast, cold sweat running down his spine—God Almighty, this is gonna be a clusterfuck—and he’s groping around in his belly for a thread of fire, in his head for an image to hook it onto. Knots a hand into the conjuring gesture and hauls the Cap seeming through and out. It’s awful, it’s like walking around holding a cardboard cutout in front of himself, but he’s out of anchors and there’s no time to get fancy.

Through the door and—and Banner—the Hulk, the green monster is hauling himself up to stand, hunched over and shaking his head and rumbling a low-voiced growl. There’s no trace of Banner left, no keen intelligence in his eyes: he’s all wounded animal rage. His song is a full frontal assault of sound, sirens and screaming and the blare of alarm klaxons, chaotic, no discernible pattern to it. And Stark is—

Stark has opened up the visor of his helmet again and is hands up and open, easing his way in gentle gentle like he thinks he’s a horse-whisperer, crooning, “Hey, Bruce, big guy, you’re okay.”

Steve doesn’t know much about thermonuclear astrophysics but what he does know—knows from the inside, for decades outta his life—is wounded animals. And Banner’s _other guy_ is just now coming outta—outta getting stabbed and then a shape change like nothing Steve’s seen, the kind of violent tearing apart and shifting that renders the soul down to slurry and white-bright pain and cringing animal reflexes.

And maybe there’s some kinda intelligence in there, the briefing says he was able to recognise and protect his best girl but—but _right now_ is not the time to appeal to that kinda higher reasoning, Jesus H. Christ—

“Stark, back off,” Steve says, low and moonlight-calm, and—

And the Hulk rears up and roars like the fabric of the world tearing asunder and backhands Stark in the chest, throws him clear across the room with an ugly grinding crunch of armour and—

Okay, so this got fucked beyond all recognition real fast.

The Hulk screams, pain and anguish and blinding rage, advances on Stark—he’s up again, repulsors in his boots firing to throw him back upright.

“Okay, plan B,” Stark says, and his visor drops and he raises his arm and—and the forearm opens out, a tiny missile unfolding and it’s pointed square at Banner’s _face_ and—

“Stark, _no_ ,” Steve hears himself shout, throwing himself forward—

And the missile launches, shoots straight past the Hulk’s face and—and into the wall, sharp clap of metal tearing and then—

The blast is a howl and then—and then ringing silence and Goddamn but Steve’s ears hurt like someone’s shoved drill bits in ‘em—fuck. He’s deaf. Perfect.

There’s a hole in the wall you could drive a bus through, and—

And the Hulk is on Stark, snatching him up by an armoured leg and slamming him onto the floor like a rag doll—God Almighty—

It’s not like Stark to have missed. He’s got guidance programs in that suit that are more clever than the equations they used putting men on the moon. And the Hulk was right fucking in front of him—unless.

Unless he didn’t miss.

Steve takes a breath—this is gonna blow, this is gonna be a Godawful mess—and then he drops the Cap-seeming and runs forward and—

The Hulk is hunched over Stark, punching and punching centre mass and— _Holy Mary_ , the floor is giving way under his armoured back, metal caving in and—and Steve jumps, half-lands on the Hulk’s thigh, drops to all fours and claws his way up— _parkour, cocksucker_ , and it’s like fighting a writhing mountain—

Grabs a massive shoulder with one hand and then a green ear between finger and thumb, twists and pinches like Winnie Barnes in her best form. Screams, as close to that ear as he can get, “ _Hey, pretty boy._ ”

The Hulk heaves and—and Steve’s already letting go and throwing himself away, back, rolling like a bag of elbows and knees and—veil, veil, come on you dumb son of a bitch—

Hauls a veil out of his ass. It’s probably the worst veil he’s done since he was ten Goddamn years old but it’s blurred him enough that the Hulk—hesitates. Doesn’t put his fist straight through Steve’s skinny fucking pigeon chest. Buys Steve enough time to—he’s back on his feet and back peddling, fast and graceless and staggering for the hole in the wall.

For the Hulk-sized exit tunnel. For the quickest way off this boat.

And the Hulk is—still hesitating, confused enough by the veil that—and he looks back at Stark, teeth bared and shoulders heaving, like he’s thinking about going back to finish what he started.

Christ on a bike—Stark’s alive, Steve can still hear his song—just faintly: aggressive guitar solos and the spit of welding sparks flying—past the raging torrent of the Hulk’s song. He’s alive but he won’t last another round under those sledgehammer fists, so Steve’s gotta—

In the file—in Banner’s part of the briefing package. Last time he’d had a major incident was Harlem, fighting that Special Forces asshole—Blonsky. Another recipient of Steve’s legacy with the Goddamn serum. There were a couple still shots in the package of Blonsky, of the—the monstrous nightmare creature of bone and gristle that he’d turned into, so—

Suck in a breath. Call up the image, mind’s eye. Reach down into his belly for the fires of making—and _Christ_ but that hurts, pressure in his head like someone’s jamming thumbs in his eye sockets and squeezing. Too much sorcery, too much power—and he’s gotta get this done, so: fuck it.

Haul the power out and through and—the seeming flares to life in front of Steve. Captain Emil Blonsky, codenamed the Abomination, nine feet tall and Technicolor and—it’s kinda two-dimensional. None of the pictures in the file showed what he looked like from the back, so Steve’s just kinda let it fade to a blur but—but the part the Hulk’s looking at is convincing enough and—

And Steve’s still deaf as a Goddamn wall but the Hulk’s _roar_ is the kind of volume that transcends sound and becomes physical, slams into Steve like an ocean wave on a hot day, and his song goes _berserk_ and Steve’s staggering, reeling backwards—through Stark’s hole in the wall, flash of white-pain in the meat of his foot where he brushes against a glowing metal edge—

And the Hulk charges at him like—like a Goddamn truck, something that big has _no fucking business_ moving this fast and—and tears through the seeming, confetti streamers of brown and gold twisting through his massive arms like smoke, through the white of bared teeth and Steve hauls ass backwards, throws another seeming—this way, _come on gorgeous, come this way_.

Out into the access corridor. He staggers into the wall, rebounds, almost falls and—and the Hulk is through, tearing into the second seeming like a rabid animal, mouth open and moving—he’s screaming, yelling or—it might be words but Hell if Steve’s gonna try and lip read, too busy running backwards and holding together his veil and conjuring up—

Seeming three, and the Hulk is through it almost before it forms, like he’s actually picking up speed oh Christ Almighty—

Wall at his back— _fuck_ , the end of the corridor and the door release is somewhere on the wall behind him—mashing at it with his fist and—

And the Hulk is _right there,_ close enough Steve can see the Goddamn striations of pink and red on his fucking tongue and—

And the door slides away—nothing at his back and he’s lurching out into the open space where the engine housing was, scream of cold wind tearing at his skin and—lifts his hand, casts another illusion of the Abomination right in the doorway—oh Jesus, his _head_ , oh _God_ —folding the seeming over so it fits in the gap and then Steve’s left heel hits open air and he stops dead.

Oh God, end of the line. There’s a whole lotta nothing right behind him, warped metal girder shredded at the end and trailing wires like torn muscle fibre—and fresh air and thousands of feet straight down. _Fuck_ —

The Hulk tears through the door frame—steel parting like tissue paper—tears through the seeming, still surging forward and—

—and slams into Steve and—he’s been hit by a truck before. Avignon, in 1944.

He was Cap-shaped at the time. It’s kind of different.

Green elbow clipping him across the right collarbone, across the chest—and he’s aware of the butchers’ shop grind of bones breaking somewhere past the psychotic tempest of the Hulk’s song, aware of the blinding pain like a railroad spike in the chest—

And he’s falling—

—they’re falling: the Hulk accelerates like a bullet train but he can’t brake worth a damn and he’s tumbling off the edge, limbs and flailing and falling and thank Christ for that. Steve’s got one Goddamn thing right today. The Hulk is off the helicarrier. No one else has gotta die today.

Banner will survive the fall.

Steve—yeah, okay. Steve is fucked beyond all recognition.

He’s tumbling, he’s—wind ripping at his skin, his hair, his eyes, pulling the air from his lungs. The world is flipping end over end, green and white line of the horizon flashing past, the grey of the helicarrier shrinking overhead, the vast blurry blue and green of the ground below: the helicarrier must be flying over land now. Not that it’ll matter to Steve—terminal velocity is terminal velocity, whether he’s smashing to Goddamn paste on stone or soil or water or—

Think, Rogers, come on. Switch your Goddamn brain on and think—

He—if he was borrowing with a bird, sea eagle or seagull or snow hawk, if he had wings right about now he’d spread ‘em, catch at the air like a parachute and— _parachute_. His shield, his—

It’s still on the fucking helicarrier. He left the Goddamn shield on the Goddamn carrier because he’s a Goddamn idiot. Okay, what if—

He took his gloves off when he shifted down to his Stevie shape. So he doesn’t have the _come-here_ anchor for his shield, the coin glued to the inside palm of his right glove. He’s gonna have to cast the spell the old-fashioned way, like some kinda plebe. It’ll take—maybe a minute.

He’s got about a minute and a half before he hits the ground and bursts like a wet paper sack of ground beef.

No pressure or anything.

Eyes closed and breathe—he’s sipping in the thinnest gulps of air, past the howling suck of the wind as he falls. Close eyes and go within—past the blood-wet ringing scream in his burst eardrums to the music, his own song, to the fires of making and unmaking that rise from his belly as he reaches for ‘em. And oh, Jesus— _it hurts, Mam, it hurts so much_ , like molten lead spilling from the cup of his skull and down his spine—

Look: on the bright side, if he hits the earth and breaks like a watermelon dropped off a hotel balcony, at least he won’t have to wear the magic hangover he’s got coming down the line. Holy Christ Almighty—

Haul up the song—the luring song, the _come-here_ song—when Ulfadhir explained the spell to him, seventy-some years ago, he said it worked by changing the orientation and force of gravity, which—yeah, okay. That makes sense.

But it makes more sense to Steve to think of it like he’s putting on his prettiest lace panties, that he’s wriggling his way into one of his best dresses—maybe the navy blue number, with the deep-cut neckline and the white and green floral design—and he’s painting his lips, creamy peach.

He’s gonna walk out into the living room and watch Bucky’s jaw drop, watch his pupils spill wide and black like wet ink on the page. He is the lure, he is the source of all hunger, all desire—

And the spell tumbles out and through him like silk underthings sliding over skin and—and he can see it in his mind’s eye, the shield: sliding over the metal floor like it’s falling, like gravity has gone sideways, bouncing through doorways and down the corridor and through and out and _come here come here come here—_

Opens his eyes and reaches out—left arm, uninjured side—and snatches the shield outta the air, twists his hand into the strap and—and it was hurtling fast as a bullet, throws him spinning in the air again, sky-horizon-ground-horizon-sky so fast—

And _relax_ , you son of a bitch—Steve learned how to parachute from a plane with the Army, sometime back in pre-history: and the fix for an uncontrolled spin is to relax, which is almost impossible to do but—relax, pity’s sake, come on—

Falling, belly down. His right arm is fucked, tucked to his chest, but everything else is loose and open as an embrace and the spin slows and stops and he’s belly down and—opens his eyes.

The ground is close enough he can see colour shifts in the landscape, fields and trees and he’s got maybe twenty seconds before—

Shield down, pointed at the ground.

Time to field-test his experiment.

Here’s what Steve figured, as he sat in the square of sunlight on his living room floor and drank coffee and wove anchors into coins: if you weave a spell in a particular way, certain threads of power and tones in the song, and then—and then it has a particular effect—well, if you weave a spell in the exact opposite way—threads, notes, tones—will it have the exact opposite effect?

So, say, if you took the _come-here_ spell and turned it inside out, would you end up with a _go-away_ spell?

Turns out the answer is _yes_ , and he spent a kinda hilarious twenty minutes throwing himself across the living room floor with it. And then he sat down and hauled the shield into his lap and spent the next hour and a half casting and re-casting the _go-away_ spell, layer after layer, into the star in the centre of his shield.

And he’s tucked into the curve of the shield, as much as he can, falling and—and pressing his knuckles to metal, to the centre of the vibranium where the star sits, where the static-warmth of the anchor hums against his skin. Square on with the ground, star pointing straight down, and—

And reaches in and through and _go away go away go away_ —

It’s like he’s in free fall through thin air and he’s suddenly hit a layer of split pea soup—he’s still sinking like a stone but it’s that much slower, that much easier—startles him so bad he lets go and he’s falling again, teeth gritted and dimly aware he’s making some kinda dumb animal wailing noise. Again, come on: _go away go away go away_ —

Opens his eyes in time to see the Hulk hurtle past. No parachute spell in his back pocket, poor bastard, but he’ll survive the fall. Touch wood. Christ, that’s—

And he’s falling through mud and dust and powdered earth, chunks of grass—the Hulk musta hit the ground like a meteor, shockwave of his impact throwing up a wave of earth in all directions so—so— _shit_ , he’s close, can see the tops of trees for Christ’s sake, and Jesus he’s still falling so fucking fast, too fast.

_Ave Maria, gratia plena_ , oh please _go away go away go away—_

_CRACK_.

Black.


	5. Chapter 5

Wake to pain, blinding, searing, vast enough that—he feels like he’s half-lifted out of his body, like his soul is recoiling in self-defence, shuddering half-in and half-out of his flesh. The world is a red screaming ruin—his ears, ear drums, still shredded. No healing factor in this shape. He’s staring up at the sky, white light of the sun driving glass shards into the backs of his eyes.

He’s broken his—quick inventory—his everything. He’s broken his everything.

Breath is coming tight, short, hurts like he’s leaning into razor blades every time his chest expands: broken ribs. Collapsed lung, probably.

He can’t feel his legs. He’s distantly aware he should be worried about that.

And he’s distantly aware that there’s some kinda noise coming out of him—can’t hear it but he can feel it bubbling in his throat, some kicked animal anguish kinda noise, and—

The nausea comes without warning, and he’s got just time enough to turn his head a fraction before he’s puking, and it’s hot and dark red and tastes of copper and _that’s blood, Rogers. You’re bleeding inside. Might wanna look into that._

Blinks dully and watches the red of his blood soak into the dirt. It’s like he’s watching it on a movie screen, distant and removed, and—

It’s welling up in his throat again. Jesus, he’s bleeding like a stuck pig.

He’s gonna fucking die here.

He’s gonna— _shit_. Come on, man. There’s gotta be—shape change. He can—

He can’t, he really can’t. The well in the bowl of his pelvis is almost dry, the flimsiest little whisper of power left just keeping him breathing, keeping the muscle of his heart beating. The channels that run between his belly and his head ache deep and solid like they’re bruised.

Okay, so— _Christ_ —he’s vomiting again, more blood, dark and thick and rank. Christ on a bike.

There’s a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency Cap-shape anchor glued under his belt buckle—he’d layered the spell in there, should be good for at least one more shift—please, please—

Just gotta get to it.

His right arm is broken, right shoulder, right collarbone, with thanks to Dr Jolly Green. His left arm—

It’s—somewhere he’s screaming, past the roar in his ears, and then the scream tapers into a whine, high-pitched and broken— _it hurts it hurts_ but he can kinda move it, and then he looks and sees that his forearm is hanging on a thirty degree angle from halfway down its length, like he has a second elbow. The white of bone stands out like an exclamation mark.

The roaring in his ears shifts abruptly to ringing, ringing like the shrillest bells and the air feels like it’s turned to custard in his lungs and— _you stupid son of a bitch, you can’t faint: you’ll fucking die_ —

Moves his arm. He’s giggling, laughter hiccupping up and through his chest like vomit, and it hurts _so fucking much_ but it feels like he’s in a puppet show and his limp white fingers are the ugliest Goddamn puppet in Creation, dragging ‘em down across his hip to his belt, shaking so bad he almost misses the mark—Christ’s sake—buckle, come on— _there_.

Come on, Goddamnit, please, _please_ —

The spell blooms up and through him like petrol thrown on a fire and—and it’s blinding, he’s a human-shaped outline and an ocean of searing animal misery, white-sparks of lightning up each limb as bones fuse and then—he’s screaming, he can hear himself screaming and then—

Black.

 

*******

 

“Cap?”

Wake and—and patter of dirt against his hip and then there’s hands on him, and Steve blinks and flinches—touch is a deal breaker, but—

“Oh my God, Cap?” It’s Banner, he’s—washed pale as spoilt milk, rumpled as a windswept Cocker Spaniel, mostly naked—the ruins of his trousers have slid most of the way off his hips—and knelt next to Steve in the dirt, patting him down with shaking hands.

“M’okay,” Steve lies, batting hands away and sitting up. He’s—oh thank sweet Christ: he’s Cap-shaped. The spell worked. Feels like he’s fallen off a Goddamn helicarrier—shifting over fixed his bones but he’s still got this hysterical thread of screaming exhaustion running through his core. God, he could sleep for seventy years.

They’re in the middle of a Steve-shaped crater, dirt and mud and—it’s a field, green and wildflowers and copses of trees in the distance. There’s a Hulk-shaped crater nearby, like a massive scar on the earth.

“You’re—that’s too much blood,” Banner says, and he’s looking at—at the wash of caked-on blood down Steve’s chin and neck. “You shouldn’t be moving, man, you’re bleeding internally.”

“It’s okay, I bit my tongue,” Steve says, and Banner gives him a look like _are you shitting me_ that is so reminiscent of Bucky circa 1928 that it’s all Steve can do to not laugh out loud. Try again: “Okay, I maybe broke a rib or two. I’m fine, I’ve got a healing factor. I’ll walk it off.”

“What the Hell happened?” Banner asks.

“We fell off the helicarrier,” Steve says. “Loki stabbed you—”

“Oh, God,” Banner says, gaze going distant and hand creeping around to cover that vulnerable spot in his ribcage. “The other guy… Is anyone—did anybody—”

“No, Doc,” Steve says, quick, solid as a Goddamn rock. “Stark and I corralled you off the ship before things got pear-shaped. No casualties.”

“Jesus,” Banner says, and puts his head in his hands, shaking hard. He’s still like that for a moment, and then he lifts his head again. “How are you not dead?”

Excellent fucking question, pal. “I had a parachute pack,” Steve lies. “Didn’t get to do the straps up right, though, so I lost the damn thing in midair.”

Banner nods, distant, eyes flicking to—down and right: he’s remembering, according to Ulfadhir’s lesson on tells, eighty-some years ago—

“You were… smaller?” Banner asks, and Steve has to lock down hard to keep from flinching like he’s been kicked.

“I hate to point it out, but just about everybody is smaller than your other guy,” Steve says, smooth as silk on a shoeshine, giving his best shy-but-charming bonds-sale smile.

“Yeah,” Banner says, eyes darting again, interrogating whatever shards of memory his scrambled brain is throwing up—“Was—was Blonsky there? This, uhh, big ugly exoskeleton guy—”

Jesus H. Christ, he’s sharp as a Goddamn tack. “Loki was throwing illusions around,” Steve says. “You mighta seen all sorts of things.”

“Okay. God,” Banner says, rubbing at his face with both hands. He looks like he’s soldiering through a hangover. “So, uh, Captain Rogers. What now?”

“Listen, Doc,” Steve says. “We’ve fallen off a helicarrier together, and I’ve seen your johnson—” Banner twitches, looks down, sighs and hauls his ruined pants up enough to cover his junk again. “I feel like you can call me Steve.”

“Only if you call me Bruce,” Banner answers, with this fine-china-fragile lop-sided smile, and Steve feels like the biggest piece of shit under God’s bright sun. Lies, damned lies.

“Well, Bruce, I guess we call for our lift,” Steve says, fishing in a belt pouch for his comms unit.

But Banner’s—Bruce’s eyes have gone distant again, tension running across his shoulders like a piano wire pulled tight—“Oh God,” Bruce says. “Before the engine—the tracking program, the Tesseract. It’s in New York.”

 

*******

 

Twenty minutes total and they’re back on the helicarrier—a SHIELD agent drops out of the clouds in a quinjet and ferries them back upstairs. They’re met on the tarmac by Agent Hill, one arm in a sling and slow-bleeding from a shallow cut under her right ear and looking absolutely murderous, like if they put her in a room with a Chitauri army she’d have the problem solved with prejudice in about two minutes flat, and then she sweeps ‘em inside and down to the med bay where—

“The prodigal sons return,” Stark says, waving a hand at them, effusive. He’s sitting perched on the side of a bed, dark bruising down his right cheekbone. A medic in scrubs is knelt on the floor, fixing some kind of mesh-cast around Stark’s right leg from the knee down. It’s bright red—the guy clearly has a theme and he’s sticking with it.

“Oh God, Tony, was that me?” Bruce asks, sounding sick.

“Your alter ego packs a wallop, I’ll give him that,” Stark says, cheerful. “Fractured tibia and fibula, fractured ribs, significant bruising to centre mass, and this schmuck—” —he waves at the medic working on his leg— “—keeps insisting I’m concussed. I keep trying to tell him: it’s not brain damage, I’m this charming _all the time_. Also they’ve given me some kinda drug cocktail which—my dealer needs to get her hands on this stuff, because I am _higher than God_.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Banner says, mumbles it into his hands, eyes closed and turning away like he’s in pain.

“Hey, Doc—Bruce,” Steve says, because—look, he knows about guilt. Steven G Rogers has screwed the pooch so hard and so often you could make a Goddamn highlight reel of all his fuckups and still have material on the cutting room floor. And right now they’ve gotta stay the course, so—

Hands on his shoulders—Christ, he’s such a little guy when he’s not green and raging. “Bruce, listen—this isn’t on you. You didn’t make a choice to do—any of that. Loki rigged the game from the start: this is on him, okay?”

“Oh hey, yeah,” Stark says. The medic between his knees is getting up, tugging off a pair of purple gloves and slingshotting ‘em into a waste bin. Stark is still talking, and Steve can see the slight spill of his pupils, can recognise the run-on blur of his speech: the docs really have given him the good shit. “No harm, no foul—well, some harm, but still no foul. Also, does the SHIELD budget not run to a jumpsuit or something? Why do you look like an extra from Mad Max?”

The Doc’s wearing—on the flight up he’d found a length of plastic cable in the jet, rigged up a belt. Then he found an emergency blanket—it’s silvery, reflective—and cut a hole to make some kinda poncho thing. It’s—a different look, that’s for sure. Bruce looks down at himself, sighs, scrubs at the mess of his hair.

A door slides open, deeper into the medical unit, and—and Romanoff slips through. Steve feels—something that’s been pulling tight and sharp low in his gut lets go, shaky and warm: the last time he’d seen Romanoff she’d been fighting for her life. And she’s okay. Has a fat lip, red curls roughly finger-combed into order, and some kinda wound-sealant goop has been pasted over the bullet graze on her right arm. Steve nods at her; she nods back, eyes darting as she takes in the room.

“The Tesseract,” Steve prompts.

“The tracking algorithm narrowed the location of the Tesseract to New York City,” Bruce says. “Midtown, or moving into Midtown—as of maybe two hours ago.”

Holy Mary, has it only been a couple hours since the engine detonation? Feels like half a century or so.

“Shit,” Stark says. “New York? That’s—we’re talking about the most densely packed civilian population on the continent.”

“I don’t think Loki’s familiar with the Geneva Conventions,” Romanoff says, eyes darting.

“Is that the end goal, though? Or just another distraction?” Bruce asks, and—and then the medic is putting a pair of blue scrubs in his hands. Bruce looks down at them, blinks, continues: “Thank you—I mean, is there even a reactor of sufficient energy density in the middle of New York City to—”

“Son of a bitch,” Stark says, gaze cutting to the mid distance and face bleeding pale and—

“Oh, jeez,” Bruce says, hands convulsing tight around the blue fabric.

“Care to share with the class? Boys?” Romanoff asks.

“You know, Stark, I like that Godawful ugly building of yours _less_ all the time,” Steve says.

 

*******

 

Ten minutes and they’re en route to the hangar bay—

—and it’s ten minutes of utter chaos: Bruce changing into scrubs while yelling at Stark who keeps getting up and taking careful steps on his broken leg—

“Look, who even needs bones?” Stark says, wobbling on his cast. “I’ve got a shiny metal exoskeleton back at the Tower, I’ll be fine. Bruce. Think pink thoughts,” and Bruce is rubbing at his face, answers:

“Two of you, there’s two of you now. Have you met Captain _‘I’m gonna just walk off my internal haemorrhage’_ Rogers?” and waves at Steve with one hand, and Steve pastes on his best look of exaggerated innocence—

—and Romanoff and Hill are having some kinda conference in the corner, furious exchange of intel—and here is where Steve learns that Director Fury was shot during the incursion—

“Through and through, lower right quadrant. He’ll be fine,” Hill says, and Steve has to chew on the inside of his mouth to keep from grimacing: the last time Steve saw active combat was before the invention of broad spectrum antibiotics, and a gut wound would kill you dead, slow and ugly. “I’m on point for now. We’ll turn every resource SHIELD has toward Midtown and Stark Tower.”

—and at some point the door deeper into the med bay slides open again and a sturdy blond guy in battered combat gear snakes into the room and Steve does a double take and then—it’s _Agent Barton_ , and Steve picks him up by the scruff of his uniform and pins him to a wall but—

“Whoa, bad touch, okay, we’re okay,” Barton sings out, and he’s pulled a tiny knife from a hidden sheath to rest the tip in Steve’s armpit, which—holy shit, he’s quick—and Romanoff looks around, breaks off her conference with Hill to explain—to Steve, to the room at large—that Barton is okay: that Loki’s spell is broken, and his mind is his own again. Which—Hell, just— _Jesus_ , I mean—

Loki was controlling Barton through the sceptre. Loki is himself being mindfucked by the sceptre: its Godawful song is threaded all through him, distorting his mind and compelling his emotions and—

Steve needs to know—

“How did you break the spell?” he asks, and his voice comes tight and rasping—

“Cognitive recalibration,” Romanoff says, and Steve blinks at her.

“She hit me really hard in the head,” Barton adds, and then seems to notice he’s still holding the knife and makes it disappear again, smooth as melted butter. “Big fan of yours, Cap, by the way. I had your face on my lunch box.”

“Am I the only person here who hasn’t got some degree of recent brain trauma as we go into battle with the army from outer space?” Bruce asks, and by the tragic look on his face he already knows the answer, and as Steve’s looking around he notices—

“Where’s Thor?” Steve asks. And Hill makes a face like someone’s shit on her front doorstep and—

It turns out they’ve lost Thor: that at some point during the Goddamn mess of the incursion he’s disappeared. “The hydraulic chamber we were keeping Loki in is gone,” Hill says. “We’ve got no idea what happened in there—all the cameras were disabled, we’ve got no feed—but near as we can figure Thor must have gone out that way. Maybe Loki tricked him in there.”

“Sounds in character,” Romanoff monotones.

“So—for those keeping score at home—that makes it not one but two actual Norse Gods we’ve lost track of today,” Stark says, bright as a new dollar. “Two seven-foot-tall divinities in steampunk medieval garb, just slipped away. Go team.”

“Have we found the chamber?” Steve asks.

Hill nods: “No sign of Thor, though. He walked away from a thirty-thousand foot drop, but we don’t know where he is now.”

And then Romanoff holds Stark down, injector in her fist, and doses him—“It’s just noradrenaline, naloxone, some other stuff for luck. Don’t be a baby,” she says, casually holding him pinned against the bed, one arm in an arm bar and pressing the mouth of the injector to his neck—

“Safe word! Safe word!” Stark answers—but whatever she’s dosed him with levels him right out within a couple minutes—thank Christ—and then they set off for the hangar bay, swing past an armoury so Barton can stock up on arrows and Romanoff can stock up on bullets and—

She’s got a whole locker of specialised gear—bracelet things and tiny taser bugs and—and there’s a belt of throwing knives hanging in the back, grey-black and supple, the blades slender and smooth as stockinged legs, and Steve’s fixing the laces on the spare pair of combat boots someone’s dug up for him but he keeps looking back at those blades, at—

Romanoff turns from her locker, fixing closed the clasp of her bracelet. Stops, meets Steve’s eyes, looks back. Reaches in and pulls the belt down and hands it to him.

“Oh, I can’t,” Steve says, automatic, pulling one of the blades out with a thumb—the metal is pale and smooth and matte, like the belly of a wolf—

“They’re a ceramic alloy. Don’t lose them,” Romanoff says, closes her locker and walks out again, and Steve hesitates for half a second before—fuck it. Literal army from outer space: he’s going out there with every weapon in his arsenal, and if it doesn’t play well for Captain America’s sanitised twenty-first century image, everyone can just sit on it and spin. The belt of knives goes on around his hips.

And then the hangar, and they’re met by Agent Coulson—he’s shed his suit jacket, tac vest over his white shirt, and there are rusty old blood stains smeared across his belly—and they board a quinjet and—

They’re in the air—Coulson is in the pilot’s seat, Stark leaning in to talk to him about getting Stark to the top of the Tower: his suit was trashed by the Hulk, but there’s another model in production—and Romanoff is cleaning her gun and Barton is minutely adjusting the tension in his bow and Steve is—he’d be praying, normally.

This is where he would have been praying, back in the days before the ice: using his rosary chaplet or counting ‘em off on his fingers. Right now he just—he can’t find that certainty, that still place inside himself. It’s all explosions and the iron taste of his own blood, thick on his tongue, the chaos-howl of the Hulk’s song screaming and screaming—there’s no place still inside himself to rest.

And he’s so—it’s been so Goddamn long he’s gotta take a minute, centre himself, before it sinks in and he can recognise: he’s angry.

Jesus, he’s so _fucking angry_ —there was no room for that in the ice, nowhere for rage to go but back on himself, endless recursive loops down and down into the black. It’s been decades, been most of a century since he’s felt it: the burn low in his belly and welling up, painting everything in shades of blood and skin-hunger, like he wants to put his claws and teeth into something and _tear_.

So he’s not—he can’t—he’s… not on speaking terms with God right now.

Flash of blue-green, crossing his vision: it’s Bruce, oversized scrubs hanging off his shoulders like a sack, swinging to sit down to Steve’s left.

“So,” Bruce says. “You did say, that when it came it would seem inevitable and reasonable.”

Steve takes a second to reroute inside his head, figure out—Jesus. “Oh God. Bruce, I’m sorry: I know you didn’t want any part in the fighting. You’re not a soldier, you didn’t sign up—” but the Doc is waving his hands, talking over—

“It’s okay, Steve. It’s—you’re right. I didn’t want this. But, you know: it’s an army of aliens from outer space. If ever there was a time to let the other guy off the leash…” He combs a hand into the mess of curls on his head—there’s still dust and chunks of dirt in there. “And you’re down one God of Thunder, so I figured you need another heavy hitter.”

“You’re not wrong,” Stark says, leaning in—he’s got one arm up hanging onto the rack overhead, keeping most of his weight off his broken leg.

“Thor will be there,” Steve says, and as he says it he knows it’s true: that Thor can’t give up on Loki any more than Steve can.

He shoulda talked to Thor, shoulda found a way to start the conversation—the guy’s his uncle, for pity’s sake—and it’s too late now.

“You sound remarkably certain about that,” Stark says, quirking his eyebrows.

“Didn’t you wonder how Thor found us in a moving aircraft over the Black Forest, in the middle of nowhere? Outta the whole planet, the whole universe—”

“Google Maps?” Stark suggests.

It’s reassuring that Stark is still an asshole even without the influence of experimental narcotics.

“He’ll have some kinda Loki-radar, eyes in the sky, something,” Steve says, and what he can’t say is: magical sensitivity. Even if Thor doesn’t use sorcery, he’s still sensitive to its presence in the way that humans are sensitive to the presence of sunlight, or the smell of cooking food—it’s part of his _sensory array_ , in the package deal. “He’ll be there.”

“Ten minutes out,” Coulson calls back. “There’s satellite imaging—activity on the top of Stark Tower. Looks like the cube.”

Thank Christ for that: it’s not another of Loki’s feints. The cube is there, which means Loki will be too. Last inning. Steve is outta anchors, outta tricks, out of power, just about out of ideas. He needs— _they_ need to get this done.

“Okay,” Steve says, hauling himself up to his feet. Looks around at—at this disparate bunch of assholes and spies and well-intentioned nut jobs. God: he’s right at home.

“Here’s where the rubber hits the road, fellas—and lady. We don’t know what we’re heading into here—we could all be hip-deep in alien tentacles ten minutes from now. Here’s what I do know: it’ll be an honour to be hip-deep in alien tentacles with any of you.”

He’s got their attention. Romanoff holsters her gun. He can see Coulson watching close in the curve of the cockpit glass.

“Way I see it,” Steve says, “First thing we try is to stop the portal from opening. If we’re too late, if that won’t fly, it’s gonna get Goddamn ugly, fast, so—priorities: closing the portal, and protecting civilians. There’s, what, three million or so souls on Manhattan Island on a work day?”

“Give or take a few hundred-thousand,” Stark says.

“Third priority is pest control,” Steve says. “Fourth and final priority is apprehending Loki. I’ll bet any money Thor is gonna show up, so—if I get eaten by aliens or a building falls on me—” —or if Steve disappears to take a run at his father: he has a plan now. _Cognitive recalibration_ — “—then Thor’s gonna take the wheel, okay?”

The quiet that follows has an edge to it. Barton is pinching his brows down. Stark looks like Steve’s offered to sell him a bridge in Brooklyn. “Listen, anyone else here wanna tell me they have experience leading a group of specialised superhuman fighters against an actual Goddamn army?” Steve asks, and when no one has an answer for that one: “So, maybe think about listening to the thousand-some-year-old soldier-prince.”

He’s also the only other guy on the team with any kinda vested interest in bringing Loki down alive. Layers of redundancy: if Steve fails, maybe Thor gets the job done. Christ, please—

“Are we good?” Steve asks, looks around, clear eye contact, his best look of earnest intensity. He gets—Romanoff, nodding; Barton blinks and then nods too, slings his quiver over his shoulder. Bruce flashes a thumbs up and turns away, face pinched and pale, like he’s getting in ahead of the Godawful pain to come when he shifts over and—and Stark’s nodding, his gaze narrow, assessing. “Then let’s go pick a fight with some aliens,” Steve says.

“Go Team Super Secret Boy Band,” Stark says.

“Team what now?” Romanoff asks, eyes lidded as she half-smiles at Stark, and—

“Well, Team Avengers Initiative,” Stark says. “Go Avengers? Some think tank at SHIELD came up with the name, clearly—”

“That is a _lousy_ name. Is it too late to get outta this thing?” Barton asks.

 

*******

 

They’re flying over Midtown, close enough to see Stark Tower dead ahead through the glass of the cockpit, a razor-edged monolith, and—and then there’s a wink of light like a vast blue eye is blinking and a pillar of blue flame claws the sky in two, up from the Tower and into the atmosphere and—

When the portal opens in the sky—like the aperture of a camera lens, opening, the black gloss of glass revealed underneath—opens and it’s all Steve can do to swallow back the welling nausea, the creeping horror like a cold wet fingertip running up his spine. It’s the _Valkyrie_ , her final moments in the air, it’s watching Schmidt dissolve screaming into atoms of light and agony and insane rage as the hole in space devoured him, swallowed him part by part—

And then the hole in the sky starts spilling aliens like maggots tumbling out of an infected wound. They’re too late.

They’re too Goddamn late and people are gonna die and—

“What was that about preventing the portal from opening?” Coulson asks.

“Yeah, that’s off the table,” Steve says. “Keep heading for the Tower.”

“Roger that,” Coulson says, shoulders set—they’re close enough to see something of the troops coming through the portal now, slick grey flesh and armour, flying chariots—

“You ever play Galaga, Agent?” Stark asks.

“Not for these kinda odds,” Coulson answers, and then he’s banking hard to—Steve grabs overhead, grabs Stark by the shirt front to catch him as he staggers—weaving around a bolt of—it’s some kind of energy weapon—and now there’s aliens shooting past, flash of grey metal and Coulson banks hard the other way.

“Be ready,” Coulson yells over his shoulder—can just hear him past the howl of the quinjet’s engines, crackle of energy weapons, the shriek of the blue beam that’s cleaving reality open at the seams. “If I park this thing they’ll blow us outta the sky. You’ll have to jump.”

“Any chance of some more happy drugs?” Stark asks, starts clawing his way towards the back of the jet, and—and he’s white pale, sweating, using his arms more than—Christ, his leg has gotta be killing him.

Steve lets go and lurches over, grabs a support beam overhead with one hand and Stark’s arm with the other, tugging. Stark’s hurting enough to let it happen, let Steve do some of the lifting, get ’em to the back of the jet, and—and Bruce is there, braced and ready, hand on the door release button.

“Doc?” Steve asks.

“Thermonuclear astrophysics,” Bruce answers, pointing out at—at blue light, at the Tower top—Holy Mother, it’s coming up—at the Tesseract, the portal device. “We want the portal closed, right? Priority one?”

“You’re gonna try and science it?”

Bruce half-shrugs. “If I can’t science it, I can always smash.”

“I see we subscribe to the same school of engineering,” Stark pants, and Steve feels something in his chest bleed warmth and pull tight and squeeze. This is—God, he’s known this bunch of assholes for all of two days but—this is pack. This feels like _pack_ —

And then gravity flips sideways and they’re hanging on for grim fucking death—Steve hears Stark groan through gritted teeth as his weight shifts and—they’re slowing, slowing down hard and—

“Now, now, _now_ ,” Coulson barks, and Bruce slams his hand on the button and the rear door opens—howl of the wind ripping at Steve’s uniform, and the scream of the portal generator is deafening, eclipses thought—

—and Bruce grabs for Stark and Stark grabs back and they’re both tumbling out and through—“Oh _shit_ ,” Steve can just hear Bruce yelp and then—

And Steve slaps at the button, closes the door as the world lurches again, and he’s falling, back slamming into the metal of the door as it closes—they’re hauling ass outta there, banking again, hard—something explodes, close enough to the jet that Steve feels the clap of sound like a slap in the belly, feels the shudder through the metal of the jet and into his bones.

“ _Pater noster, qui es in caelis_ —” Steve starts, breathless, before he remembers that he and God aren’t taking each other’s calls right now, and then he throws himself forward and claws his way back to the front of the jet.

“Sitrep,” Steve calls—Romanoff is hanging onto the backs of the cockpit chairs, standing on bent knees, and Barton has jumped into the co-pilot’s chair and—there are about a thousand moving lights on the display in front of him and he’s moving a stick around and hitting buttons and—and one of the alien chariots in front of ‘em dissolves in a ball of flame and shrieking metal shrapnel. Weapons system, some kind of—

“Lot of fliers,” Romanoff shouts back. “They’re dropping infantry units down at ground level too. They’re targeting civilians, cars—”

Fuck. Fuck everything. “Get us down there,” Steve snaps, and—he’s made it to the front, can see for himself, see—everything. It’s a Goddamn mess: there’s hundreds of chariots in the sky, just the tiny pie-slice of New York skyline he can see through the windows, and flames lick up from below. He can see ant-small people running, weaving between cars—

Can see ‘em going down under energy weapons fire. They’re fish in a barrel.

“On it,” Coulson says, mouth a flat line. Pushes the yoke forward to send the jet down, down, and—

“Barton, three-o’clock—” Coulson barks, and—

“Got ‘em,” Barton answers, and half a second later there’s another explosion, close enough that Steve can hear the bolts of the jet rattle in their panels, close enough he can feel the vibration in his teeth, and then they’re banking again—like they’re gonna fly into the side of a fucking building oh Christ—and veer again, hard left and down, hard enough Romanoff staggers into Steve and—

Another blast, shrieking clang of metal shrapnel hitting the side of the jet—and bank again, sharp as razor blades, and Romanoff braces herself against Steve like he’s part of the furniture—and street, street immediately below, coming up fast, line of cars stuck in place and fleeing civilians and—

Grey, tall, two arms and two legs and armed with—with some kinda spears, some kinda energy rifles—Chitauri infantry units, at least a couple squads, chasing down a group of civilians, and Barton says, “Yeah, I don’t think so,” and then he’s mashing buttons and the jet is spitting machine gun fire like hail.

The Chitauri troops go down bloody, falling mid-stride like the Hand of God has fallen on them, and then—and then they’re past ‘em, over the civilians, over—more cars, more stopped traffic, flames licking up from overturned vehicles and then—

Intersection of 5th Avenue and there’s enough clear ground to put the quinjet down and the jet’s engines scream as Coulson pulls up, stopping on a dime and dropping them down and—

On the screen, every lit-up dot—seem to be the flaying chariots—every dot in a quarter-mile radius has just turned and started towards the centre of the display, towards—towards them. “Well, that’s pissed them off,” Coulson says, hitting the button to open the rear door.

“Move out,” Steve says, and Romanoff and Barton are already moving, and she’s unholstered her guns and he’s putting an arrow to the string. Steve turns to Coulson, talking fast over his shoulder as he heads back: “No heroic last stands, okay? Keep moving. You’re our only air support until Stark gets to his armour.”

“Yes, sir,” Coulson says, and then there’s a screech—sounds like a rusted hinge opening under half a foot of jelly, garbled and wet and razor-edged—and Steve faces front and—Chitauri trooper right the fuck there, starting into the jet with his—its?—its spear up, and Steve pulls a knife from his belt and throws, automatic as breathing, plants the blade neat and clean in the alien’s left eye. It drops like a sack of shit.

Knives. Shield. Comms unit. Dog tags. Cap shape. The only weapons, only tools he’s got left. It’ll have to be enough, and—

And Steve will have to be enough. Whatever last shreds of his soul there are left, rusted and torn and worn down to bone by time and pain and the horror of the ice, he’s gonna have to be enough.

Priority one: deal with the fucking alien invasion.

Priority two: cognitive recalibration.

He’s out—slows for half a second to pull the knife outta the trooper’s eye; he doesn’t wanna know what kinda price Romanoff will extract from him if he loses one of her knives without damn good cause—out of the jet and into the sunlight and looking around, assessing, studying, rattling his brain for some kinda plan. Romanoff and Barton are already at work, ducked behind an overturned car and exchanging fire with a squad of Chitauri troopers.

Mechanical moan of the jet door closing again and then howl of the engines, rush of heat and burnt-plastic downdraft and then the jet is in the sky again, and it’s huge, loud enough to rattle the sheet glass in the shop fronts: an excellent distraction.

No one is looking at Steve right this second, so—drop into a half-bend and sink his weight down over his knees and—flanking manoeuvre, around the side of the taxi cab until he’s looking at the squad’s left side, maybe 30 feet away and wide open—

Shield up and coil like a spring pushing in, in, in, tension down his arm and across both shoulders, the length of his belly, into his thighs and—

And _throw_ —and he’s aware in some distant kinda way this is the first time he’s really thrown his shield since 1945, thrown it like he Goddamn means it, and it feels like stretching out a muscle that’s been trapped in a plaster cast—it almost hurts but _fuck_ , it’s good. This is what the Cap shape is _for_ , and—and the shield flies like a hawk striking, smooth and effortless and _CRINNNG,_ bell-tone song of vibranium hitting armour.

One and two and three, slamming into heads, into the neck, bouncing from target to target in a neat triangle and Steve’s running, slamming boot first into one trooper’s armoured gut—down, squealing—

—and snatching the shield outta the air and—knife in his other fist, swinging and weaving— _CLANG_ , shield in the face and keep turning, keep moving—

—knife thrust in the unarmoured neck and slash and tear and grey-black blood spills and _duck—_ and then one of the troopers goes down with an arrow in the face and another folds with the bark of a handgun and—

—swinging up and through, shield edge square up and under the jaw, hard enough to sink into bone—blood sheeting out as he tears the shield away and turns—another arrow, another one going down and—

And done, clear. A couple of the downed Chitauri are still kicking, writhing on the asphalt and making that Godawful garbled shrieking noise. Steve kicks one of ‘em in the face—good night—and Romanoff shoots the other one, single barking retort of her gun and—clear.

A flier streaks by overhead, firing—more energy weapon blasts, streaks of blue light like the Hydra weapons used to use—and melt to the left and right, ducking behind cars, Steve hoisting his shield up overhead. They’re on the outer edge of the ground battle, civilians running past and—eye of the storm is the Tower. There are thousands of people packed into these city blocks, and more Chitauri infantry hitting the ground every minute, so—gotta get the civilians outta here.

“Let’s move,” Steve says, starts back up the street towards—the Tower dominates the skyline in every direction, is every bit as ugly as he remembers, and the blue light of the portal is still spilling from the top. Safe to say Bruce hasn’t come up with an answer for the portal yet. Romanoff and Barton fall in, smooth, weapons ready.

“This is Budapest all over again,” Romanoff says.

“You and I remember Budapest very differently,” Barton answers.

Steve taps his comms unit. “Stark, what’s your status?”

“Uhh, small hiccup,” Stark answers, sounding—breathless? Urgent. “In the form of Loki, a Loki-shaped hiccup, just—what’s that saying about no plan surviving first contact with the enemy?” There’s—shattering glass, a yelp, and then the comms cuts out again.

Christ on a bike: Loki’s at the Tower. And okay, it’s good to pin him down, to know where the Hell he is in the middle of this clusterfuck, but at the same damn time Stark’s _vulnerable_ until he gets into his armour, and Loki is _not fucking about_. “Stark, do you copy?” Steve asks.

“Yes, just—oh _shit_ —” and silence on the comms, long enough that Steve feels something cold and liquid spill from his chest down into his belly, is about to—at the topmost level of the Tower, a window bursts and—red and gold, ant-tiny at this distance, a red and gold shape falling like a meteor, straight for the earth, for the concrete ninety stories below—

“ _Fuck_ ,” Steve spits, and then, “Banner—” because Bruce is the closest, the only one who can respond, but—but he’s not gonna be able to do shit: even if he’s big and green he won’t be able to get to the ground any faster than Stark, fast enough to keep Tony from smashing over the concrete like a shiny beetle on a windshield—

—and there’s a wink of blue-white light and then the suit is pulling up, Stark is pulling up, curving out of the fall like an eagle striking her prey and then hauling up again, one fluid movement. Holy Mary, Mother of God—

“Okay,” comes Stark’s voice again, and it’s clearer, smooth as bourbon over ice, like he’s stood right behind Steve and talking into his ear. “Okay, I’m suited up. You guys didn’t start the party without me, right?”

“What did I miss?” Bruce asks, sounding distracted, and—

And then there’s a busload of people pinned down under Chitauri fire and there’s the running, the fighting, shield and blade, blood and the searing shriek of energy weapons fire, there’s—

—there’s Romanoff jumping off the top of a car, driving a captured spear through a trooper’s chest, and then—

—and then Steve is shield-up over this guy in some kinda business suit, deflecting energy blasts from a fucking chariot overhead, and then Barton puts an arrow into the chariot pilot’s neck and—

—and then Steve is yelling instructions at some cops, trying to get some kinda evacuation happening—

—and overhead there’s some kinda cat-and-mouse game happening, Stark and Coulson leading platoons of fliers into one another, explosions and shrapnel raining outta the sky and—

Banner and Stark take up the comm channel for a solid two minutes yelling excitedly about the portal device, how it appears to work, what Banner oughta try to deactivate it, until: “If the barrier is energetic,” Stark is saying, “A wavelength of equivalent—” and silence, blessed silence from Steve’s comms unit, broken after a heartbeat by—

“I routed them onto a separate channel,” Coulson says, blandly—Steve can see the quinjet shoot through an intersection two blocks to the east, a trail of fliers in pursuit.

“Appreciate it,” Barton says, pulling an arrow out of a downed Chitauri’s eyeball, nocking and firing in one smooth movement, and—

It’s maybe ten minutes later that Steve’s comms unit crackles awake again and Banner’s voice comes past a layer of static: “Okay, guys: science isn’t working out so well. Gonna try plan B.” And then the comms cuts out, and—and Steve looks up from smashing in a Chitauri skull with his shield, looks around and—there’s an unearthly roar, from everywhere and nowhere, rippling back from the cavern walls of concrete and glass.

Steve looks to the Tower, but—but the portal is still open, blue flame licking up the middle of the sky like a stiff middle finger from God. _Fuck_ —

A couple minutes later there’s a _thud_ like a dud shell landing, like the ground shakes with it, and then the Hulk is there, tattered blue-green scrub pants hanging from his ass, wades roaring into the middle of the firefight and—and the Chitauri troopers concentrate fire on him and it does precisely dick-all, energy blasts rolling off green flesh like water off a duck’s back. He picks up a trooper in each massive fucking hand and throws them at the nearest wall and—it’s over real quick after that.

The Hulk looks around at the end, spots Steve, stops, and—Steve feels his heart twitch hard in his chest, like it’s trying to pick a fight with his ribs, because—Jesus, what if he holds a grudge? What if he remembers Steve climbing him like a mountain goat and tearing at his ear— _Hey, pretty boy_ —

And then the Hulk makes a huffing sound and throws the last trooper—limp in his right hand—across the street. It hits a parked car. The car alarm starts wailing.

It’s different—this time is different. Whether it’s because Banner chose this, or because there was no stabbing involved, or because it’s real fucking clear who the enemy is right here, right now—this time is different.

“Science didn’t work out, pal?” Steve calls.

“ _Puny science_ ,” the Hulk rumbles, and it’s like if a landslide could talk, tempered fury, deep enough Steve feels it vibrate in the bones of his pelvis, and then the Hulk leaps, light and casual, and is halfway up the street engaging the next squad.

“Hulk smash,” Barton says cheerfully, and then—

“Holy shit,” Stark says in Steve’s left ear, and Steve looks up and—

It’s spilling through the vast open mouth of the portal in the sky, it’s—Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it’s fucking huge, it’s—it’s a behemoth, massive, like a building turned on its side, plated armour down its sides and—it’s a whale, is the nearest Goddamn thing his brain can come up with. It’s an armoured fuck-off space whale.

Bucky’s spaceman comics did not prepare Steve for this.

“ _Bozhe moi_ ,” Romanoff breathes, and somewhere up the street the Hulk roars, full volume, primal, the kinda noise that talks directly to the lizard part of Steve’s brain and makes the hairs down his spine stand on end.

The armoured space whale is—swimming—flying? Flying down from the portal, slow and graceful in the most—most brain-fucking kinda way, like it belongs there, suspended in the sky, effortless, no apparent—propulsion systems or, or—

It’s maybe a little hypocritical for Steve of all people to wanna call foul on this thing just bending the laws of physics over and fucking ‘em. But still—

_BOOM_ —and—was that thunder? Holy _fuck_ —

The sky is _writhing_ , black clouds forming up in swirling spikes like the ramparts of a castle, lightning crackling between the fingers of cloud and—and thunder rolling, rolling, deep as the belly of the earth, and every car alarm in Midtown that’s not already wailing starts to howl, and the glass sheets of windows rattle and hum with the vibration of it, clouds mounding higher, darker—

And the lightning strikes, whip-fast, dozens of blazing spears of white light hitting the space whale—in the face, in the flanks, licking and crackling and—and it’s recoiling, writhing, roaring toneless pain or fear or—

And then a red and silver streak soars out of the guts of that swirling black mass, lightning spilling in his wake like sparks from a welding flame, and Thor hits hammer first, hits like a missile, square in the Goddamn centre of the space whale’s nose and—

There is a _CRACK_ like the surface of the world is splitting open, and then—

And then the space whale goes corpse-limp, sags like the strings have been cut, and falls outta the sky like a fucking stone.

“Son of a—” Steve gets out, and then the space-whale hits the tarmac, some intersection a couple blocks over from the sound of it, and everything quakes, the world liquid underfoot like they’re in an ant-farm and some little shit has just picked up the tank and started shaking it, a series of enormous limp metal-and-meat _crunching_ sounds like slaps to the eardrum.

There’s a hiccupping half-second of silence—and Thor lands on the car next to Agent Barton, hollow metal _thunk_ as the car roof half-caves under the weight, steps down into the street graceful as a dancer, and—

And there’s a metal-edged moan from the sky, bass-note deep, and Steve looks up to see another armoured whale-thing coming through the portal, and—and another, and then three more, spilling through one after the other, smaller fliers in their chariots pulsing out in waves like an arterial bleed, and—

Jesus. Jesus Harold Christ on a crutch, they are fucked beyond all recognition.

“Uh, guys?” Romanoff says—she’s stood to Steve’s left, spear at her side and head back just looking up at—at the army coming through—because this is an army. It’s been skirmishing before now, it’s been a cat playing with her prey. This is—

They need to close the portal.

Science didn’t do the job. Smashing has failed. Maybe—maybe it’s time to try it the other way.

“Cap, tell me you’ve got a new plan,” Stark says, coming to hover overhead and cutting the repulsors and landing, crunch of broken concrete under his boots and—and Thor is striding over, Barton and Romanoff, the Hulk—coming together in the face of this, this clusterfuck that’s bigger than any of ‘em.

_Ave Maria_ —please, Mam. Please, _don’t let me fuck this up_. Deep breath.

“Alright, listen up,” Steve begins.


	6. Chapter 6

“Alright, listen up,” Steve says, tearing his eyes away from the sky, the portal, the Goddamn invading army, to look at the people around him. The team. He’s talking fast, words spilling out with a lotta Brooklyn Mic in ‘em: “Until we can close that portal up there, we're gonna use containment. Barton, I want you on that roof, eyes on everything. Call out patterns and strays.”

Barton nods, slides the couple arrows he’s inspecting back into his quiver.

“Agent Coulson,” Steve says, tapping his comms to hail him. “You’ve got the perimeter. Anything gets more than three blocks out, you turn ‘em back or turn ‘em to shrapnel.”

“Sir,” comes back on the comms, tight, breathless.

“Stark, you've gotta get up there and bottleneck that portal. Slow them down. Whatever you got in that arsenal of yours—use it.”

“Wanna give me a lift?” Barton asks, and—

“Don’t go anywhere yet,” Steve says. “I’m gonna need a lift upstairs too.”

“What are you doing?” Stark asks.

“I’m taking a run at the portal,” Steve says, and if he keeps talking fast enough that no one can question it—“Romanoff, Thor. I need you here at street level. Keep the fighting here, keep ‘em off the civilians. And Hulk— _smash_.”

Two minutes later Steve’s in the air, pinch of armoured plates biting at his arms and chest and back through the Kevlar of his uniform, street and buildings shrinking below as they haul ass up and—

“Whoops,” Stark says, and then they’re spinning wildly, howl of weapons fire streaking past and—“So—two of the finest scientific minds in the world just tried to close that portal down with no success. What’s your play, Cap?”

“Maybe it’s not a science kinda problem,” Steve grits out. “I don’t know yet, just—if we don’t get that portal closed, we’re FUBAR. I gotta try.”

“Well, fresh eyes, maybe,” Stark says, and then: “Hang on—” and they’re banking hard to the left, shriek of Stark’s tiny missiles engaging and—

And they’ve made it, top of the Tower, and Steve is spilling outta Stark’s arms and hitching up his shield and—

“I’m hit,” Coulson spits over the comms, blurring with static: “I’m sorry, I—”

Steve looks up, looks around at—he’s got a panoramic view from the top of the Tower, can see the scope of the battle in all directions, and—and over at Lexington Ave he can see the quinjet, arrowing down for the ground, tail on fire and disappearing behind the horizon line of buildings and—

There’s a hiccuping half-second of silence, and then the ragged slap of an explosion, flame and metal and—

“ _No_ ,” Stark says—he’s still hovering next to Steve like he’s frozen, hum of his repulsors grinding away mindlessly, and then he’s cocking his wrists and shooting off, towards Lexington, towards the quinjet.

“Stark, no,” Steve calls, tapping his comms. “We need you—with Coulson down, you have to hold the perimeter.”

“But I gotta—”

“Job’s not done. Tony. Hold the perimeter, man,” Steve says, and—and God _damn_ if he doesn’t feel like a fucking monster. If he doesn’t feel like the worst kinda scum. But—but the job’s not done. And Christ knows how many thousands will die if the fighting spills out over the rest of the city, so—“Please,” Steve says.

_Dear Commander at the Roman Emperor's court—_ rolls through his head, rolls through him, mouth shaping the words silently like it has only God knows how many times before. _Saint Sebastian, protector of soldiers, please_.

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Stark snaps, and then there’s a punching flare of light from his repulsors and he soars away, towards—towards the perimeter.

Okay. Okay—job’s not done. Steve puts his shield up and heads for the stairwell door.

He wasn’t lying—he’s gonna close the portal. Just—if Stark and Banner couldn’t do it with science, and the Hulk couldn’t do it with brute force, then—then he needs another way, and— _Loki_. Loki will know how to close the damn thing. Just gotta pick him up and shake him until the compulsion spell falls outta his head. _Cognitive recalibration_.

Into the dark of the stairwell and down, down and—the levels are marked in yellow paint against the concrete walls. Down and down, silent and steady, shield up and—90th floor and the stairwell door is broken, lock forced out of the fireproof wood and steel.

Deep breath and shoulder his way through, shield in front, and—

Daylight, spilling down the corridor. It’s empty, but—but the air is moving like there’s a breeze coming from somewhere, and—and he can smell sweat and leather and—forward. Cat-creep down the corridor—would be nice to have a veil right about now but—and end of the corridor, spilling into daylight, into—

The room is a huge open space, all marble surfaces and glass planes and gleaming metal edges, vast windows that spill out onto the flight deck, out onto the city skyline. Loki’s stood in the centre of the space, unarmoured, relaxed, half-turned to watch Steve come in like the city burning in front of him isn’t interesting enough to hold his attention.

And the Goddamn piece of shit _sceptre_ is in his right hand, base resting casual on the floor, jewel at the tip winking clear pale blue light.

“Did you borrow with a Goddamn fish, to get that back?” Steve asks—last seen disappearing into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean—

“An octopus,” Loki answers, calm, glancing at the sceptre in his hand. “It’s only polite, to pick up after oneself.”

“Listen, I don’t know much about polite behaviour on Asgard,” Steve says, lowering his shield and pointing out at the world—at the rising flames and plumes of smoke, the hundreds of flying chariots, the motherfucking armoured space whales that—Christ, there’s four of ‘em just in the chunk of New York Steve can see. They’re fucked, they are so fucked. “But here on Earth, bringing along an army and invading the damn place is considered dirty pool.”

“How narrow,” Loki says, with a moue of his nose and mouth, and then he turns back to watching New York City fall.

Steve hefts his shield, steps forward into the room. There’s a bar running along one side, levels carved into the marble of the floor, couches laid out in elegant shapes to embrace the skyline. Loki is a level below, maybe thirty feet or two thousand miles away from Steve, and— _cognitive recalibration_. He needs to get close. He can probably wing Loki in the head with his shield from here, but that only works if Steve’s not talking to an illusion.

It looks real: blinking, shifting slow and easy. Steve can hear a sluggish heartbeat, can hear the bellows of rib and lung tissue shifting as Loki breathes in and out. He can smell the leather and metal of Loki’s clothes, the stale tang of fear-sweat.

Loki has always been very good at illusions.

Touch is the only deal breaker. Steve has gotta get closer before he makes his play.

If it’s an illusion, if Loki—or whoever’s pulling his strings—realises what Steve is trying to do—he might only get the one shot at this.

“Da, please,” Steve says—steps forward, easy easy, like he’s working his way towards a skittish alley cat, and his mouth is moving on autopilot, recycled pleas that didn’t work before and won’t work now: but he needs to keep Loki talking, keep getting closer. “Let me help you, okay? It’s not too late.”

“Your city is falling,” Loki says, pointing with the sceptre. “This world will fall. The Chitauri are more machine than beast: they do not tire, they do not stop—”

“You don’t want this,” Steve says, and he’s still cat-creeping his way forward—stairs and down, twenty feet and closing.

“I will _rule_ this world,” Loki says.

“You’ll be a puppet,” Steve says. “Come on, Da—you taught me politics, remember? Whoever’s put that glow stick in your hands and that army at your back, they’ll be the one calling the shots. You’ll be a _puppet-king_ , you’ll be—”

“I am a _God_ ,” Loki roars.

“—the _scapegoat_ , first guy on the chopping block when it all goes to shit,” Steve says, and—and for a second it’s almost like he’s getting through: Loki rears back, blinks hard, twice, and then his eyes dart, connecting dots and—

The sceptre pulses blue light, and his eyes glaze over again. Christ on a crutch—fine. It’s—he’s almost there. Ten feet and closing.

“I can help,” Steve says, recycling again, because it doesn’t matter, he’s just gotta—“Tell the army to stand down and we’ll figure this out before anyone else has to die—” and he’s six feet out and—

Loki turns, sceptre held out, and Steve freezes—Christ, he’s so close, but he still hasn’t managed to touch, find out if it’s a seeming or the real deal. Loki’s face is haunted, pale and mad as a sack of weasels— _sing bonnie boys, bonnie mad boys_.

“If you stand against me, you’ll die,” Loki says, and—and it comes out thin, colourless, like he’s shut down hard, like he’s gotta squeeze the words out.

“You don’t wanna kill me, Da,” Steve says—hope to Christ that’s still true—

“Truth,” Loki says—God, how many games of Two Truths and a Lie did they play when Steve was a kid? Loki cocks his head, quirks his mouth, says: “I do not wish for your death. So you must join me.”

Steve’s—frozen, for a good couple seconds, before his brain kicks over again, frozen and staring, like his Da’s just started speaking in tongues because it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t make a lick of sense. How—

Just how thoroughly bugfuck has Loki—Steve’s Goddamn father—just how fucking crazy is he right now that he’s even asking—

“No, Da,” Steve says, and there’s a shaking hitch in the words that he can’t help, can’t stifle. “I’m not gonna join you. There are people dying out there, right now. I have to stop this. I have to stop you.”

“I wasn’t asking,” Loki says, and then he pivots smoothly and extends his arm that extra few inches and presses the tip of his sceptre to Steve’s chest.

There’s—he’s thinking past a layer of fog, a gentle blue-grey mist that drops over the world, takes the edges off—this is—the briefing pack, Fury’s description of events in the chamber when Loki first came through: that he rested the end of the sceptre on Barton’s chest, Dr Selvig’s chest, and then they were ensorcelled, spelled, his puppets. So this is—bad, and—the mist is soothing, mother’s milk, like he could just lie down in it but—

Touch. Loki is touching him: sceptre, chest, pressure through the Kevlar of his uniform. Touch. And—blue-grey mist, sleep now, easy now—touch means something, means—

Touch means Loki is really here. Touch means he’s inside striking range, so—

The mist is pulling the thread of thought away and he grabs at it, grabs on like he’s latched onto razor wire, like it’s tearing at him, slicing into flesh—no, he can’t go down, he’s gotta—

He can work with this.

Shifts his weight, puts it all on the back foot. Rocks in place, gentle, easy. Looks into his father’s eyes, blinking—pale blue and clear and insane. Lifts his shield, slow and easy, like he’s walking in his sleep and—

And _go_ —

He’s heaving forward, explosive, lunging and swinging and the spear-tip of the sceptre is punching into flesh, into bone and it can’t matter right now, swinging with everything he’s got left in the tank, up and around and slam the edge of the shield into Loki’s head, _CRAANG_ of metal on bone and—

And Loki drops like a sack of shit, eyes rolled back, limp as overcooked spaghetti—razor-bright tear of the spear-tip pulling outta his chest wall and—and Steve’s legs are folding like wet tissue paper, he’s falling, he’s—

—distant bite of knees-elbows-nose-skull on the marble floor, and there’s a blaze of white-bright cold in the centre of his chest. He’s—on the ground, on his face, trying to push up on his elbows but—is he drunk? Why is he—

Warm-wet feel of blood over skin, rolling over his chin and down his jaw, and the reek of iron hits his nose. Bleeding, Steve, you’re bleeding heavy. Again.

_Twice in twelve hours just seems like attention seeking_ , mutters the part of his brain that kinda sounds like Ulfadhir, and he chokes on a laugh but it comes out wet and red. Okay, that’s—blaze of cold-heat in his chest swells brighter, colder, like someone’s lit a strip of magnesium ablaze, and there’s a steady warm sticky stream of blood dripping down, chest-neck-chin-jaw and down to the marble floor.

Coughs out some more blood. Yeah, he’s fucked up real good this time.

Gotta—grey-black welling up from between the floorboards, the cold mud—gotta do something, gotta—shape change. If he can shapeshift he’ll be okay, just—

There’s a low moan somewhere off to the right and Steve turns his head just—Loki, on the floor, picking himself up slow and shaky, and then he looks over at Steve and he’s blinking, milk white, and his eyes are _green_ , green like the ocean just before a storm hits, and—thank fuck. Thank Christ Almighty—

Shape change, Steve, come on—black mud spilling up and over, copper-iron sticky wet weight over his tongue—and he’s gotta stay afloat, gotta think—his dog tags. They’re pressed to his chest, he just needs—something, needs to—ah, _fuck. Mam, it’s getting too cold, need to—_

_—can I climb in bed with you, Mam_ —

Black.

 

*******

 

_Crack_ —

—and wake on the marble floor, searing pain dancing across every nerve, every cell, and he’s on his back, pressure and weight in the centre of his chest like a Goddamn tank is parked there, and his skin is sticking to the marble with blood and everything reeks of iron and the black mud is welling up, lulling, pulling him back down—

_Crack_ —and he’s seizing, tearing his eyes open to—Ulfadhir is knelt over him, one hand cocked where he’s just slapped Steve across the Goddamn face, other hand on his chest—and there’s sheet lightning dancing across his skin, lightning he’s just shoved into Steve’s fucking chest and—applying pressure, sunk almost wrist-deep into the wound—

_Crack_ —third slap, backhand, _hard_ —“I still haven’t given you permission to die,” Loki rasps, and Steve’s blinking, mouth opening— _Da_ , he wants to say, but what spills out is a mouthful of clotted red-black mess. Loki scowls, leans in harder and—and it’s cold, biting into the meat of Steve’s chest, frost arcing into blood and bone.

Ice magic. Makes sense: Steve can survive freezing, can’t survive bleeding out. Ice, slow everything down, buy some time—

_Crack_ —another slap, and Steve snaps his gaze back to his Da. Ulfadhir is knelt so they’re almost eye to eye, and he’s staring, glaring, black as a thundercloud. “Stay _here_ , you little shit,” he snaps. “Do you know what happens if you die? I go find a witch and persuade her to teach me necromancy, and then I spend the next century screaming at your idiot ghost.”

“Okay,” Steve mouths—can’t give the word any force or volume, his lungs aren’t working. He’s freezing, slow, ice crawling through his tissue, turning blood to mud and muscle to hardened oak and it hurts, Jesus, it hurts so much.

It’s the ice all over again, and maybe he never left, maybe he’s so _cracked_ he just spun the whole thing up in his head so he’d have someone to talk to—

_Crack_ —another slap, and: “ _Fuck off_ ,” Steve whisper-screams, and it hurts so Goddamn much and he just wants it to stop, wants it all to stop, and why won’t Ulfadhir just let it _stop_ —

“ _Concentrate_ ,” Loki snarls. “I can’t fix this. I’ve not the skill—you’ve flayed open the muscle of your heart. You have to change your shape.”

Mother Mary—shit, that’s right. Shapeshift. He can do that, just needs—his dog tags. Under the uniform, pressed to the skin of his sternum, tacky with caked on blood—come on, concentrate. It’s right there—anchor, spell, change—

Focus, centre your shit, come on—haul his attention away from the middle of his chest—heart, _pressure_ , pain, aching burning tearing, the creeping ice—just above there, just up a few inches, whole skin and sticky blood and his dog tags, and—focus in, come on. Can feel the spell anchored in the metal, warmth of magic. Come on, come on, _please_ —

Blooming warmth of the spell unfurling and then searing pain, muscle fibres tearing and bone groaning as it presses down and in and a flaying pain in his centre, in his chest, like someone’s hacked his sternum open and butterflied out his ribs like a Goddamn rack of lamb and he can hear himself screaming, feel hands and boots clawing at the marble until the pain eclipses thought and—

 

*******

 

“—tell them to target the portal,” Steve hears, muddy and from a distance, and he’s turning his head, trying—that sounds like—

Sounds like _him_ , the voice Steve always affected on the Spangled circuit, all vigour and command and safely middle-American sounding, and he cracks his eyes open, squints to see past the haze of grey mist.

Loki is—he’s stood by one of the huge glass windows, gazing out, and he’s holding his hand up to—he’s got Steve’s comms unit and he’s talking into it, subtle humming weave of a seeming to change his voice just enough—“Tell ‘em to come up Park, Stark’s gonna lay out the welcome mat,” Ulfadhir says, and what the Hell is—Jesus, Steve feels like a wet sock, like he’s had a fist fight with God and come up wanting.

There’s—Steve can hear explosions, distant and fuzzy past the grey, and—and Ulfadhir’s turning, slipping the comms piece into a pocket of his coat and picking up the sceptre from—he’s dumped it over next to the couch—and walking out, up the stairs and out.

“ _Da_ ,” Steve mouths, and then the grey fog seeps in again, slow and easy, and he’s sinking back and down and—

 

*******

 

The next time Steve wakes up it’s because the fucking world is ending.

It’s—a _roar_ like a rockslide, like the whole Goddamn mountain is coming down on top of you, and—it’s the _Hulk_ , and Steve kicks, thrashes, rips open eyes gummed up with dried-on blood—

The Hulk is here, hunched in the middle of the room, and—and they’re all here, Thor and Romanoff, Stark landing with Barton—spills out of Stark’s arms and draws his bow in one fluid movement, drawing a bead on—

Loki is stood next to the couches, arms at his sides and open like he’s greeting guests. He’s wearing this pasted-on half smile, and his hands are shaking with exhaustion, and—

And no one is looking at Steve, which seems—he’s veiled. Can hear it, now he’s awake and listening for it: a textbook invisibility veil arched neatly across him on the floor. He’s in his little body, his real body, over by the wall like someone’s—Loki has—hauled him out of the way, thrown a veil over to hide him, and—there’s a knife on his belly. Slender, gold hilt chasing into blued metal blade, placed there like a paperweight on an errant loose sketch. Oh, _Da._

“Stand _down_ , Loki,” Thor pronounces, hammer cocked.

Steve scrabbles, hauls himself up to sit—Christ, he’s done in. Taking everything he’s got to stay upright, head hurts like someone’s kicked in his skull, like his Goddamn teeth hurt, like each hair is a screaming nerve. The knife is in his lap, and he touches it with a shaking hand—warmth, static. It’s an anchor.

Loki grins, baring teeth. “And what if I don’t?”

The Hulk steps forward, snatches Loki up like a rag doll, and throws him across the room— _crash_ of mirrored glass shattering behind Stark’s fancy bar as he hits the wall and drops like a sack of potatoes—

—and the Hulk surges forward again, relentless as a hurricane, sinks green hands into the marble and steel of the bar and _tears_ , like he’s pulling aside a curtain, rips stone and metal out and aside and throws it across the room, screaming—

“Christ,” Steve hisses, and grabs up the knife—can feel the anchored spell in there, ready to pour out and through with a tug.

It could be anything, is the rub: could be one of Loki’s pre-anchored spells for fixing his Goddamn hair after a fight. But—but Loki left it with Steve, on his belly so he couldn’t miss it. Outta all the armoury of knives he coulda left, it was this one, so—so Steve pulls the thread and the spell blooms, surge of the music, of song, and—

It’s _Star-Spangled Man With a Plan_. It’s a Cap seeming.

He’s wrapped in the seeming—checks it over, quick: it’s the right uniform, wear and tear and smears of blood like he’s been fighting. Authentic, slight foxing around the edges—Ulfadhir always did have an eye for the details.

Barton is moving in, smooth, bow drawn and arrow levelled—and Stark lifts off, sputter of his boot repulsors cutting the air like the hiss of a welding torch, lands on top of what’s left of the bar and levels his palms down at—

Steve is up, lurching forward, out and through the veil, calling: “Stand down, fellas.”

There’s a collective jolt and then, they’re turning, looking back—all but Barton, eyes on target—“Captain Rogers,” Romanoff says, head cocked, like he’s done an interesting trick.

“He’s cooked,” Steve says, pointing at Loki, sprawled on his belly in a sea of broken glass. Steve’s hand is shaking so bad he can barely keep it up—thank Christ the seeming looks solid. “He’s done, okay?”

Outside—now Steve’s up and listening, up and looking around, he can see: the sky outside is empty. Smoke, howl of sirens, wail of car alarms but—but no fliers, no explosions or shattering rains of energy weapon fire. No fuck-off armoured space whales. It’s done, it’s over—they’ve pulled it off. Christ on a bike— _Ave Maria, gratia plena_ —

“I see the rumours of your death were greatly exaggerated,” Stark says, faceplate of his armour snapping open. Steve staggers forward, shifting around enough to keep eyes on Loki, gotta—Jesus, is he okay? Can still hear his song, ice shifting and phosphorous spits and cotton candy—he’s alive, and—head up, blinking, dazed, neat bloody slice down his forehead and cheek where the glass has bitten into him.

“You’ve been radio silent for twenty minutes,” Romanoff says to Steve.

God, it’s gotta have been longer than twenty minutes—how long was Ulfadhir on comms for, using Steve’s voice to steer the battle? How long has he been down for, and—and where was he, where could he have been for twenty fucking minutes—

“A building fell on me,” Steve lies, rubbing at the back of his head, all boyish and embarrassed. “I walked it off.”

Thor moves forward—goes to do the manly pat-on-the-shoulder thing on the way past—Steve shifts his weight, make it look natural, moving just outta range—and then Thor steps up to his brother, leans down, casually puts his hammer on Loki’s back. Loki makes a noise somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, sags back down onto the broken glass like he’s nailed in place, and—and Barton lowers his bow, slips the arrow back into his quiver—and Steve breathes out, all the way out.

Runners all home and safe.

Thank God. Thank someone, anyway.

Outside, there’s a soft metal groan, and then a chunk of steel and concrete drops off from someplace above and lands on the flight deck with a splintering _thunk_. There’s a long silence as they all stare that way, blinking and tired—the Hulk grunts, shifts his weight like tectonic plates moving—and then Steve asks, “So, fellas—lady—what did I miss?”

 

*******

 

After comes the flood of SHIELD personnel, securing the Tesseract and putting Loki in cuffs and shining a pen light into Bruce’s eyeballs—he’s himself again, little and pale and flinching away from the light like it’s a deadly weapon.

Romanoff and Barton sit on a corner of the couch and talk, quiet, self-contained. Stark dry-swallows a fistful of drugs, sheds his armour but leaves the right leg on, like a shiny red exoskeleton.

Thor stands on the flight deck and looks up at the sky, doesn’t watch as Loki’s taken away, and Steve—watches Thor, watches his uncle and… He shoulda said something. Could have said something. And it’s too late now, a sick weight low in his belly. He’s on the Spangled circuit again, invested neck-deep in the lie, and he can’t—

After there’s Stark, hauling the team back down to the street and—and _shawarma_ , which is apparently some kinda Middle Eastern food thing, store still open and serving rotisserie lamb like the alien invasion is a minor inconvenience.

The food is—he’s aware that it probably tastes good, but everything tastes like concrete dust and clotted blood in Steve’s mouth right now and—he should eat. He’s been conjuring and fighting and running for three days, he needs to eat, but he’s so Goddamn tired he can only just keep his eyes open and he can’t pass out, not here: he’s still in his real body, wearing Loki’s Cap illusion like a kid in Da’s pyjamas, and if anybody touches him—

He’s piecing together the narrative, bit by bit from snatches of conversation, from the team and SHIELD agents, what happened while he was out: space whales, Agent Coulson _alive_ but he’s in the hospital and it’s touch and go. The portal closed, something with fighter jets and fucking _nukes_. It sounds—insane, like someone chopped up a bunch of spaceman dime novels, jumbled up the pieces of paper, put a story together by pulling ‘em out of a hat.

Thank Christ he can claim head trauma when it comes time to debrief.

After the SHIELD agent tracks them down again, and the team’s being steered towards a quinjet and Steve wakes up enough to buck the reins. Plan is to take ‘em all back to the helicarrier and he can’t, he just can’t fucking do it, not for love or money. Can’t rest, can’t sleep, can’t collapse into a heap of shit if he’s surrounded by Goddamn spies, eyes and ears everywhere. So it’s ten minutes of arguing, and then two minutes in the air before they’re dropping him off on the roof of his apartment building and—

Bug-sweep the apartment with shaking hands. Close every curtain, every door. Take the battery out of his cellphone and the receiver out of his comms unit and throw them both in a kitchen drawer.

Drop the Cap seeming, shuddering it off, green and blue light shards dropping away. Shed the uniform on the living room floor, caked-on blood and concrete dust spilling onto the carpet like fallout. Scoop up one of the knives from Romanoff’s belt.

Tear the blanket off the bed, crawl in under the frame. Curl up around his knife in a heap of blanket and black out cold, good fucking night.

 

*******

 

Debriefing goes on for five days.

They occupy a couple conference rooms at the Times Square HQ and talk the whole thing through, every angle, every sightline, every winding version of events. There are conference calls. Senior SHIELD staff are in and out—Agent Hill, Director Fury on the fifth day—briefly, he’s washed grey under the dark of his skin, moving careful, and his sweat smells like a chemical cocktail. Agent Hand, who Steve hasn’t met before: dark haired and hard-assed like she was born fully grown and power-suited, Blackberry in hand and utterly unimpressed.

There are sandwiches in the middle of the table, and coffee runs—the Starbucks up the street is still open, smashed plate-glass window walled up with sheets of cardboard but open for business, and offering two-for-the-price-of-one large coffees for first responders or cleanup crew.

On the third day Stark loses interest in the catering and dicks around on his phone and thirty minutes later some Stark Industries intern is being escorted in with six bags of Indian takeaway and—

Steve has head trauma, Steve doesn’t remember all the details. A building fell on him, but he’s okay now—healing factor. No, he doesn’t need scans, appreciate the concern. There are holes in his story you could drive a Goddamn truck through, but—head trauma.

Can’t remember too much, sorry, and he puts on his best sheepish crooked smile, and the whole thing was such a catastrophic mess that no one can call him out on it, that he wasn’t where he shoulda been, that he’s lying like a politician before the polls.

The story comes together, fills in the gaps in the timeline while Steve was bleeding out or passed out on Tony’s penthouse marble floor: fighting the Chitauri. Agent Coulson, being cut from the wreckage of the quinjet by a fire crew and taken to New York-Presbyterian—he’s still in ICU, five days later, but he’s alive. And the fucking nukes—

“The World Security Council made the decision to nuke Manhattan Island, try and contain the invasion,” Hill is reporting.

It’s the second day of debriefing, her first appearance, and she’s immaculately dressed in her SHIELD uniform, black mesh cast on her arm in its sling. She’s reporting this like… there’s no tone shift. She put in her coffee order with the exact same pitch and pacing—but she’s bled white around her nostrils and her mouth is tight, narrow. Like she’s pissed off, which—seems appropriate, seeing she’s talking about how a bunch of _moustache-twirling assholes_ thousands of miles away from the fighting ordered a nuclear strike on New York fucking City.

Steve is taking deep breaths, chewing at the inside of his mouth to control his face, because—Jesus Christ Almighty.

“I— _firmly expressed_ my assessment of the situation, which was that a nuclear strike on a densely populated civilian target was both unneeded and indefensible, but I was overruled,” Hill says. “In the absence of Director Fury, I had to… I sent the jets. Three F-35s. It was my intention to send them as far as Rikers Island, declare there was no viable target, and call them back, but when I hailed Captain Rogers on the comms to inform him, he had a different strategy.”

Ten sets of eyes—the team, Hill, a barbershop quartet of SHIELD analysts—snap over to fix on Steve. He blinks, puts on a baffled and concerned look—has already established that he’s missing time, missing memories, while he was _buried under a building_. While he was passed out on the penthouse floor, and Loki was borrowing his voice. Jesus, what did he do—

“Captain Rogers asked me to send the jets low over the city and then have them fire their payloads up and through the portal,” Hill says. “I gave the order. Two of the jets were shot down by Chitauri fliers but one was able to make the shot… thread the needle.”

What the living _fuck_ , Da.

“And the alien soldiers deployed on this side of the portal became unresponsive soon after,” one of the analysts says, referring back to his notes from yesterday.

There’s more coffee. There’s a running tally on a whiteboard of the casualty count, people dead or missing or still in hospital, updated every few hours. There’s a barrage of text messages from Agent Sophia Chu, trying to set up an appointment so she can debrief Steve _from a wellbeing perspective_ , which Steve is ignoring with all of his soul. There’s footage—

Tony turns over the footage from his Iron Man armour and they all watch it on the afternoon of the third day. It’s all explosions and closeups of the Goddamn armoured space whales and Stark’s rapid-fire patter, image lurching around so fast it’s nauseating. The recording confirms what Stark reported when he debriefed on day one—

An F-35 jet screams into the frame, flying up the concrete valley of Park Avenue, banks up sharp a couple blocks before Grand Central and Stark Tower, fires a missile that streaks up, up, and—and they have to freeze the footage and parse through it, slow and careful, but it’s visible just the same: on the roof of Stark Tower, a figure is moving towards the portal device, towards the cube, holding a sceptre with a glowing blue light on the end.

Lurching movement, dizzy blur of light and concrete and glass and—and then Stark is closer to the Tower and it’s Selvig, it’s Dr Erik Selvig, the SHIELD astrophysicist Loki sock-puppeted after he first came through the portal, striding across the roof and over to the device, Loki’s sceptre in his fist.

He’s walking with his head back, watching the jet shoot past, the missile fly overhead, and then—and then he moves, swift and fluid, punches the tip of the spear through—it’s a wall of white light, surging up as he moves the spear-tip in and then parting like butter around a hot knife. Through the energy barrier and into the guts of the machine. There’s a hiccuping flutter and then—and then the blue-fire beam of the portal cuts off, abrupt and total.

Queasy-tilt as Stark shifts in midair, looks up and—and the hole in the sky winks closed maybe one whole second after the missile passes through.

One of the analysts hits a button to wind the footage back—another glimpse of the hole in the sky, blue-black of space and stars, vast black shapes moving slowly against the dark beyond—back and back to a frame of Dr Selvig, stood next to the machine, head back and face clearly visible—

Pauses the recording. There’s a silence in the room like someone has shit the bed and no one wants to be the first to mention it, and then Stark says: “I would like it to go on the record that I _really hate magic_.”

“It’s been noted,” Agent Hand says flatly, from where she’s propping up a wall in the corner.

“So who the Hell is that?” Barton asks, because the thing is—

The thing is, they watched a recording of Selvig’s debrief yesterday. He gave a full account to a SHIELD agent—from a hospital bed uptown. Where he’s in traction with two broken legs. Compound fractures. He was thrown off the roof of the Tower by the energetic backfire when the Hulk tried to smash the portal device. Landed on the flight deck, eight stories below. He sure as Hell wasn’t walking anywhere, let alone picking up alien weapons tech and closing portals in space.

It’s Loki, of course. It’s Ulfadhir wearing a seeming, closing the portal. Only polite to pick up after yourself.

Which is why it’s so Goddamn baffling that he’s not—

Loki is locked down in a secured cell a hundred miles below ground. Really secured this time, no more glass boxes—muzzled, cuffed, electrified, armed guards on rotation.

Once a day every day they take the muzzle off. Once a day every day, SHIELD’s best interrogation experts take a run at him. Romanoff has been down there twice. And once a day every day, SHIELD’s best interrogators come away empty-handed, because Loki’s not saying a Goddamn thing.

He’s—look, Steve’s got no illusions about his father: the guy is an asshole. It runs in the family. But here’s the thing: Ulfadhir was _under a compulsion_. Once he got free of the compulsion the first thing he did was save Steve’s life, second thing he did was fuck over the Chitauri, third thing was close down the portal.

He’s a piece of shit but he’s _Steve’s_ piece of shit and—and while he was sticking his thumb in the eye of—of whoever was compelling him. Whoever sent him. Whoever put that sceptre in his hands and that army at his back—he incidentally saved God knows how many lives.

And there is no way Steve can tell anybody that.

Steve watches the interrogation feed every day—SHIELD wires it up to their conference room. Every day, Loki is pale and silent as the moon, staring into the middle distance with a crooked little smirk that seems calibrated precisely to annoy, unflinching and unresponsive. Makes no attempt to—whoever worked that compulsion, commanded the Chitauri, they’re the _real_ Goddamn threat and Loki’s not saying anything.

And—what the Hell are they calling it these days? _Enhanced interrogation techniques_ —whatever softcore tortures SHIELD is throwing at him, sleep deprivation or starvation—it’s not even touching the sides.

And they’re softcore torturing the wrong guy for no good Goddamn reason, and Steve can’t say anything—because Captain Steve Rogers is human, remarkable but human, and definitely has no relationship with the immortal Jotun sorcerer, has no business knowing about compulsion spells and seemings and—

Thor watches and says nothing. Rubs a hand over his beard—like he wants to talk and is smothering himself—and clasps his hands—like he wants to act but he won’t. He’s gone to see Loki at a few of those interrogation sessions, and it’s made not a lick of difference: Loki, staring into the distance, smirking, silent.

Loki keeps his mouth shut. Steve keeps his mouth shut.

Which is fine. He can work with this. There’s more than one way to skin a frost giant.

 

*******

 

Debriefing goes on for five days.

The nights, Steve goes to work.

He’s been infiltrating highly-secured facilities since before anyone working for SHIELD today was so much as a twinkle in their Mam’s eye. So this feels—like deja vu. Like he’s invoking the ghosts of Buck, of Peggy as she was, studying floor plans and maps and coming up with an angle of approach, with an exit strategy.

It’s kinda different. It’s the twenty-first century; there are cameras everywhere, electronic locks on Hulk-proof doors. SHIELD know—not about him, but about sorcerers and sorcery, and their security is gonna take that into account. And—and he’s working alone. No one is gonna pick him up like a sack of beans and carry him outta the mess he’s in if he screws the pooch.

So he can’t screw the pooch, is all.

He’s slipping veiled into the security station on the ground floor of SHIELD’s HQ, photographing floor plans and shift rosters with the tiny camera on his cellphone. He’s crafting anchors—veils, shape change spells, seemings. He’s learning how to Google shit. He’s hunched over maps, he’s walking the streets getting a feel for the city, for the roads, he’s—

Agent Sophia Chu blindsides him by actually being helpful; on the third day of debriefing she manages to corner him at SHIELD HQ and hands over a charge card, access to a SHIELD account. It’s cute they think he’s gonna be stupid enough to leave an electronic trail for them to follow.

First thing he does is buy a motorbike. Second thing he does is get out a couple thick wads of cash from ATMs and put the charge card away in the kitchen drawer.

He’s running on about two hours of sleep a night, and even when he’s Cap-shaped during the day it’s Goddamn hurting, but—

Spends most of a night learning about criminal profiling, sketching, experimenting with shapeshifting until he comes up with what he needs, what will work. She’s—a little taller than his real body, white blonde hair. Eyes a luminous and inhuman shade of purple. The next night he puts on his new shape and takes her out for a walk, gets used to—moving around in a lady-shape, in case she needs to run or fight or climb out a window. Buys a bra, panties, stockings. Buys lipstick.

Last day of debrief and Steve spends the afternoon seeding the idea that they should all go out—get dinner, get drinks, and—and only Clint, Natasha and Thor bite, which is fine: he’s got Thor, he just needs Thor. Which is how he ends up eating bar nuts in some dive in Bed-Stuy at 2AM and—

“Clint,” Natasha says, poking him in the thigh with the toe of her boot. She is playing the game of pretending to be much drunker than she really is, and so is Steve—and he’s pretty sure they both know it. “Tell Rogers about your bet in the S.R. pool.”

“Okay,” Clint says, amiable—he’s half-sprawled across the bench seat, throwing martini olives into a glass on the next table, is absolutely as drunk as he seems to be. “Well, I figured: how could this big guy have snuck in and outta all of these secured facilities, behind enemy lines, and the answer…”

“The answer…” Natasha echoes, half-grinning and watching Steve’s face with eyes that are dead sober.

“Like, Cap got this super-serum, right?” Clint says. “So maybe his, like endocrine system and everything are super too, and he’s producing some kinda _pheromones_ that whammy people into—even Nazis and everyone—into doing what he wants if he gets close enough they can smell…” He trails off, studiously not looking at Steve’s face. Throws another olive. Begins again: “In my defence, I made that bet when you were still frozen under half a mile of pack ice, and I was not seeing a future where this conversation could happen, so.”

“I don’t know where to start,” Steve says.

“What is this S.R. pool?” Thor asks, and—

“How _did_ you do it, man?” Clint asks over him, kicking his legs down from the bench so he can face Steve square on.

Steve takes a breath. Picks up his beer and has a slug. “Parkour. It’s a sport.”

Twenty minutes later Thor goes to the bathroom and Steve lifts the SHIELD-issued cell phone from Thor’s jacket, left draped across the back of his chair. Opens up the back and removes the sim card on his way up to the bar for the next round of drinks. Returns the phone on his way back to the table.

Thor is the only game piece Steve can’t checkmate: he’s magic sensitive, knows a Hell of a lot about sorcery even if he’s not a practitioner, and—and he’s Steve’s uncle.

And Steve doesn’t wanna have to hurt him.

So. Easiest move is to take him off the field of play before the game starts. If SHIELD can’t contact him, can’t bring him in—

Four hours later, Steve is wide awake and sober and sitting up on the roof of his apartment building, drinking coffee and watching the sun rise over Manhattan. There are gaps in the skyline, in the hangover of battle. Irregular shapes where chunks of building are missing. Steve can see one of the dead space whales draped across the roof of a tower block, can see cranes everywhere: people cleaning up, people rebuilding.

Tomorrow, Thor is gonna pull the Tesseract outta the vault it’s stashed in, pull Loki outta his concrete hole in the ground, and take them both back to Asgard. Or that’s the plan, anyway.

Steve is—if he fucks this up, this is probably his last sunrise as a free man.

Sips his coffee—if there’s one thing twenty-first century America has going for it, it’s the coffee—and watches a cleanup crew start crawling over the space whale, power tools sparking in the distance. Runs over the op in his head: veils, seemings, shape changes, anchors. Get in, get out and—

Puts his mug down on the ledge and gets up and goes to work.


	7. Chapter 7

Here is the big idea: on the Sunday following the invasion, following what people are starting to call the Battle of New York, the Avengers will escort Loki and Thor to Central Park—nice big open space, fewer opportunities for fuckery, no buildings to fall on ‘em if there’s any kind of unstable portal blowback

And then Thor is gonna return Loki and the Tesseract both back to Asgard. Loki stands trial for his crimes, loose ends all tied off, win for the good guys—

On Saturday morning, Steve puts on his dame-shape and his swell lady’s suit—it’s charcoal grey-black, severe jacket and a split skirt, but most importantly the six buttons up the front are real copper, and they hold magic like a Goddamn charm. Steps into her new shoes—pumps, heels a little sharper than she’s used to but she’s practiced walking in ‘em—and slicks on some mascara and paints her lips in a dangerous shade of crimson red.

An hour later she veil-walks into the SHIELD HQ at Times Square, pickpockets a swipe badge from one of the junior agents juggling laptop bag and coffee cup in the front foyer, and takes an elevator down.

She doesn’t get far—this kid’s access is only good as far as the first sub-basement. Which is okay, what she was expecting—there’s plenty of fish in the sea, it’s a target rich environment, and she’s invisible. Swipes another pass from the desk of some middle management-looking asshole and rides that train down another two floors, and then—

Gets lucky in the third sub-basement: there’s a security squad filing into the lift, and she squeezes in with ‘em, pressed hard against the door, because touch is still a deal breaker and she can fight her way out if she’s gotta but that’s not the point of the exercise—

Seventh sub-basement, and Steve slithers out the gap in the lift doors as they open, heels of her pumps clacking punctuation on the metal underfoot—and these guys can’t hear it, not under her veil, but it makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end anyway. Pickpockets another badge from one of the security goons as they file past, and then—and then they’re gone, and breathe out. In again. Out again.

Look around. Get your bearings.

Move out.

Security hub is the first door on the right—Steve didn’t give this shape an eidetic memory, but she spent enough time studying the floor plan that it might as well be taped to the inside of her skull. She waits, counts to thirty, counts again—Jesus Christ, come on—and then the off-shift guys file out and head for the lift, swing the door closed behind them.

It’s not an electronic door—plain old doorknob against the security steel. She doesn’t need a hex to keep this door sealed up like a nun’s drawers.

There’s a set of lock picks in her jacket pocket.

Killing the lock means she’s gotta leave most of her picks in the barrel, jamming up the works. Which is fine, should be fine, she’s not planning to need them again today: just for this. They’re gonna need to drill the lock to get out, or kick their way through reinforced steel. Either way buys her a few minutes, which is all she needs.

Keep moving. Gotta keep moving, gotta get to—

Walks veiled past two checkpoints, a bunch of secured cells, most of ‘em empty. Guards move up and down, keeping eyes on the prisoners; dance around them and keep moving, deeper into the complex. There’s a door—there, at the end. She swipes through with the security goon’s badge, thumb and fingers pressed firmly to the plastic—fingerprints, evidence trail—and then drops it on the floor and goes through, into a narrow corridor that doubles back around. Like a maze. Like a fortress.

At the very end of the corridor is a door, steel, reinforced, biometric sealed: eyeball and handprint scanner. Steve stands square in front of it, sinks her weight low in her hips and takes a couple deep breaths. After she does this—up ’til here it’s been a cake walk. Up ’til here, she coulda pulled the pin and got out again with none the wiser. Once she does this—

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

Right hand up, to the top of the buttons on her suit jacket—metal warm and static-clinging under her fingertips.

Okay, here goes everything:

First button, first anchor—spell out and through, and her veil dissolves like winter frost on a window pane, leaves her standing in the open, and she looks up at the security camera overhead, gives ‘em a wink. Imagines some guy back in the security hub spitting his morning coffee all over himself—

Second button, go: and the shapeshifting spell pours into her, flesh and bone, and she’s keening with the pain of it—because this needs to happen _now_ , because she doesn’t have time to make it easy or gentle—muscle tearing and bone grinding and toes pinching like _fuck_ because his feet are suddenly a Hell of a lot bigger.

He chose Agent Coulson’s shape for this part of the mission for two simple reasons: first being that his clearance level is good, like there’s no place in this building, no secrets the guy can’t get to. Second being that the man himself is still attached to a bunch of tubes in the Intensive Care Unit at New York-Presbyterian, guarded round the clock by two SHIELD agents—so his alibi is fucking bulletproof. Steve’s not dragging anyone else down into the gutter with him this time.

Coulson-shaped—and _Jesus God_ , but it feels just as wrong as it did wearing Romanoff’s shape: like his soul and his flesh are recoiling from each other, wrong-ends of two magnets jammed together—slap one hand to the reader and lean in for the eyeball scanner and the access panel beeps, flashes green, and the door slides open and Steve slithers through—

And overhead lights flash, orange and white, and a second later the alarm starts shrieking, and the security door slides closed again, heavy _thunk_ of the reinforcing arms locking into place as door meets frame. Whoever is on deck in the security hub finally hit the panic button—and he’s limping because _fuck_ these shoes, clawing with blunt fingers for the third button down.

Third anchor button and—shape change again, hauling it out and through fast and he’s yelling with the pain, half-falling against the wall—it’s like God’s put a hand in his belly and is rearranging the furniture—Christ on a _crutch_ and—and _done_ , cleared. She straightens up again, lady shaped. Flashes teeth at the next security camera—look at me, analyse this—and then cat-stalks her way down to—

It’s a short length of corridor, steel and concrete. At the end—Steve’s seen all this on camera, in the videos SHIELD has been parcelling out to the Avengers in their debrief. Concrete box, soulless as a dentist’s waiting room. Couple chairs, plastic and metal, turned to face—

The box they’ve got him in this time has bars instead of glass. The bars are electrified. The walls are electrified. They are not taking chances.

Loki is sat on the bench-bed in the middle of the space. He’s muzzled, cuffed—they’re ornate and silver, came from Asgard. Specifically tailored for sorcerers: prevent speech, prevent song, prevent the gestures of conjuring.

He’s bolt upright and head cocked, eyes bright, studying, watching Steve as she comes closer—and Steve can see the moment when the penny drops, when Ulfadhir realises who he’s looking at: the half-second flash of eyes widening, the subtle shift of his weight like he’s getting ready to move.

Steve stops in front of the bars, dead centre, smack dab in front of every camera. Brings up her hand to the fourth button on her jacket.

“Odinson, you are working up quite the debt with me, aren’t you?” Steve says, loud and clear for the cameras—she’s practised moving around in this body but her voice still sounds strange to her: light, mellifluous, some kinda light trace of an accent. Smiles, a baring of fangs.

Pulls the fourth anchored spell out and hexes the electrified bars.

There’s a _bang_ and all the lights cut for half a second and then—back on, red-toned. Backup power circuits. “My bad,” Steve says, makes it winsome, sugary. Wraps her fingers around one of the bars—more fingerprints—and lets the cameras see her doing it: they’re still on, red lights unblinking, hardwired seperate from the main circuit as a security measure.

Loki stands up, slow, cautious.

Steve taps the fifth anchor button and hexes out the cameras.

Performance over—that’s given SHIELD’s analysts plenty to chase after, all of it lies, all of it leading nowhere, all of it pointing away from Steven G Rogers—tap the sixth and final jacket button and—

And shapeshift—last time, last change: and she’s howling, staggering, sinking to her knees, searing pain tearing through vein and nerve—Jesus, has she ever shifted shape this many times all on top of one another? Starting to feel like she’s bruised down to the fucking cellular level—and then it’s done, panting, whining on the out-breath: Stevie-shape. His real body.

The music washes in—concrete and steel song, bleak and rigid. Ulfadhir’s song, Loki’s song, surging along urgently and—and the alarm is still howling overhead.

Security guys will have figured out by now that most of ‘em are stuck inside the security hub, on the wrong side of a dead door, will have called for reinforcements. Will be waiting for someone senior to get here and authorise ‘em to open the secured door and come in here, authorise the use of force—and it all takes a couple minutes. And Steve’s used up most of a minute panting on the floor.

Gotta get moving. Job’s not done.

Steve picks himself up—there are pulls in the knees of his stockings from the concrete floor. Fuck everything—looks up. Loki’s close to the bars, watching, waiting, still as a cat in the breathless moment before he pounces.

Steve fishes in a pocket with a shaking hand, pulls out the metal-and-enamel pin—the kid who’d sold it to him said it was the Bisexual Pride flag on the design, little pink and purple and blue stripes, which made Steve grin—“Come here,” Steve rasps, and shoves his arm through the bar of the cage.

Loki steps in. Steve shoves his hand with the pin into a pocket in Loki’s coat, activates the anchor and drops it and steps back and—

And Loki disappears from view. Steve can hear the static-purring hum of the veil. “Stick close to that wall and wait for my cue,” Steve says, pointing. Fishes in his last pocket—inside the jacket—and pulls out the fridge magnet—it’s shaped like some kinda fucking lobster, but more importantly it’s metal, surface irregular enough that it won’t take fingerprints—and lines up, takes a breath—

Throws, gentle underarm toss. The magnet lands on the bed, sticks—anchor deploys—and Loki is sitting there, bound hands between his knees, staring straight ahead, brooding, bleak—

Stage is set. Steve steps back from the bars, pastes himself to the back wall. Conjures up a veil, quick lift and pull and twist of the music until he’s hidden from sight. Takes a deep breath, lets it out. Starts counting.

He hits _43_ and— _thunk_ of the door unbarring. The alarm cuts to silence.

Nothing happens, for a long breathless moment, and then—

And then the door bursts open and guards spill in, first couple with rifles up—they’re scanning the room, turning to check every corner, moving fast, fluid—and then another four guys with batons, and—and Agent Hill, arm still in a sling, spare hand holding her sidearm down against her leg.

The guards form up, spaced around, rifles levelled at Loki—at the seeming—and Steve dances to one side, weaves outta the way of one of the guys with a baton. It’s silent for a long moment—they’re alert, watchful: learned from the helicarrier, from their mistakes in the first round.

The seeming flickers, blurs a little at the edges, comes back sharp again.

“It’s—it’s a hologram,” Hill barks. “Get it open, we need to manually search the cell. Don’t trust anything you see.”

They’ve learned. Invisibility isn’t gonna work this time. Steve chews at his lip, watches the guards move again, form up to enter the cell. Front guy pulls a ring of chunky keys and tags outta the front of his vest, manually unlocks the hexed cell door, pauses for a breath—

Throws the door open and they’re through, moving into the cell, smooth and synchronised as dancers—four moving in, one standing squared up at the door, one guarding Hill—and Steve follows them into the cell, light on his feet, turning, ducking under a rifle barrel as one of the guards turns and closes the cell door behind ‘em. Steve keeps low, heads for the south wall. Can hear the hum of the veil Loki’s under—navigating by ear, watching the guards for sudden moves—

One of ‘em steps up to the bed and puts his baton through the illusion and it tears like wet paper, dissolves into wisps of gold and green light that curl and shrivel as they fall.

“ _Shit_ ,” Hill says, crisp, and then: “Manual search pattern. Thor’s intel says touch is the only sense they can’t fool.”

Steve listens for the veil, moving forward, reaches blind—finds Loki’s coat, the metal of the cuffs over his hands, and—reweaving on the fly, stitching the two veil spells together, and the music swells and hiccups and then he can see his father, wild-eyed and pale, eyes darting around as the guards start—they’re hands out, patting down the walls, systematic. It’s a matter of time before Steve and Loki are both fucked beyond all recognition.

“I’ve got an exit strategy,” Steve says. “Okay? I’m getting us out, but I need to pull this working together in my head, so I need you eyes up and steering. Buy me thirty seconds.”

Loki blinks, looks at Steve and—and shifts, shoulders squaring, straightening to his full height, gaze clear. Nods and puts his bound arms out.

Steve grabs onto Loki’s arms, steps in close. Takes a breath and shuts his eyes and starts weaving the spell.

The first kinda veil Steve ever learned to cast—sometime back in prehistory—was a don’t-notice-me veil. Makes you—they’ll still _see_ you, but they just won’t think too hard on what they’re seeing. Unremarkable, part of the wallpaper.

That won’t work here. These guys are actively searching, looking for specifically for Loki in a confined space. There’s no way Steve can make them unremarkable enough to get past that—he’s not the sceptre, can’t actually mindfuck people. But he can—

Weaves the veil, as strong and dense and tight as he can, layer after layer, holds the threads steady in his right hand and—and starts weaving again with the left: a seeming—black Kevlar, helmets and boots and gloved hands with batons and—

And then lurching to the left as Loki hauls them away—Steve cracks open an eye, sees groping gloved hands pass about an inch behind the shoulder of Loki’s coat.

When they were dumb kids back in Brooklyn, Bucky taught Steve and Becca both how to dance one hot summer evening—lurching around the Barnes’ living room floor to whatever’s playing on the radio—and that’s what this feels like: like Steve’s a dame dancing with a fella that’s not too familiar with the steps, leading across the floor in heaves and breathless pauses—hauled away again and Steve fumbles the seeming and—

Almost loses the threads—hold, come on, hold it together, all the parts and pieces like he’s knitting a sleeve and it won’t hold fixed until he casts off, every loose end tucked away—cracks an eye open again and _Christ_ , they’re gettin’ painted into a corner, two guards framing them, running out of room to move—

Snaps his eyes shut again—come on, Rogers, _get it done_.

Seeming in one hand, veil in the other—pulling the threads together and layering ‘em, over and under and through, anxiously humming two different songs at the same damn time and for a half a second it’s—there are too many bum notes, too many places the threads pull apart and—

And then it pulls together and his head fucking _hurts_ like someone’s put a pickaxe down the centre of his skull but it’s working, it’s holding—

Shoulder check and Steve ducks, ducks low, and Loki’s hauling him back and through under an outstretched arm and—

And there’s another guard right the fuck there and Steve looks up, looks around: no one is looking directly in their direction. They’ve got a couple second window to—“Here goes nothing,” Steve breathes, and then he pulls all the threads together and through and out and _pushes_ —

And the seeming blinks into place around them—guards, batons and Kevlar, faces mostly concealed under the helmet and glasses—the parts of their faces that’re visible, Steve’s painted in with generic-white-guy kinda looks, and no one is gonna look too close because the whole thing is woven through with don’t-notice, with eyes-glaze-over kinda boring.

Steve springs apart from his father and starts making like the other guards, searching—and there’s a half-second of Loki staring before he gets with the program and joins in, waving his arms around like an asshole and running his illusionary baton along the corners where the wall meets the floor.

“Ma’am, it’s clear,” one of the guards says, and Steve snaps to attention—just blend in now, part of the wallpaper, keep moving like they’re expecting you to and no one’s gonna look too close—

“Damn it,” Hill snaps. Holsters her gun and taps her comms unit. “Director? He’s gone.”

 

*******

 

It takes most of an hour to make it outta there—walking with the other guards, sticking close, part of the herd—Steve spent a lot of time in Greenland stalking herd animals, oxen or deer: he knows how to move like they move, to blend in, and his head hurts like he’s cleaved it in fucking two but it’s working.

They are unremarkable and unremarked, out of the chamber, out through the checkpoints, back to the security hub.

Drift to the back of the herd and grab Loki by the arm and haul ass back to the lift, swipe in with another borrowed security pass and up to Basement One, where—

Hotwire a SHIELD van in the staff vehicle parking—shove Loki in the back—there are trackers in this thing, in places he can’t get to without a mechanical design degree, and he can’t hex ‘em without maybe blowing up the engine. It’s fine, they don’t need to get far: out to the street and into traffic.

Up the ramp and out into the traffic and Steve fishes in his inside pocket for the keyring, next stage of the mission—hand shaking, almost fucking drops the keyring into the footwell. Picks one of the keys at random—doesn’t make any difference which one—and pulls the seeming out and through, pressing the key to the dashboard and—

The plain white van with New York plates is now a white van with an invented bakery logo on the side and Jersey plates. The seeming covers Steve in the driver’s seat: makes him look like Louie, the Chinese fella who used to do all the heavy lifting out the back of the grocery store Steve worked at when he was fifteen.

It’s smooth, subtle. Not a major change: even if someone’s looking straight at the van, chances are they’ll never believe what they saw with their own eyes. Easier to make excuses— _I was tired, had too much coffee, not enough coffee, wasn’t paying attention_ —than to believe they just saw a van change paint-job and driver in the middle of Midtown traffic.

Nudging at the small of Steve’s back, through the seat, and he looks around: Loki’s poking at the seat with a foot, staring over the silver muzzle at Steve, real pointed. “Keep your shirt on,” Steve says. “I’m working, okay? We’re not outta the woods yet.”

It’s weekend traffic, and weekend traffic in the aftermath of an alien invasion, so it’s a clusterfuck, so it takes a full ten Goddamn minutes to get to the parking garage that’s half a fucking block down—still open for business—and they veil and hustle into the next van waiting inside, the rental Steve hired with a stolen ID and a seeming over his face and a wad of cash.

Pull out into traffic again—it’s crowded in the back, between the silent Asgardian nutcase, Steve’s bike and saddlebags, his shield—if this whole thing goes tits up he’s got everything here, everything he needs—he can disappear and stay gone, Captain America returning to the annals of myth.

He works through the keyring over the next hour of driving, shifting seemings every twenty minutes or so—white van with a cleaning company logo, white van with a cable company logo, plates from New York and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, a series of faces in the driver’s seat borrowed from people long dead.

Outta Midtown and into Hell’s Kitchen, into the damp dark of the Lincoln Tunnel and—

When they make it to Jersey City he pulls into another parking garage, parks someplace outta the way. Hexes the only security camera he can see. Takes his hands off the wheel and throws the keyring into the passenger side seat and slowly caves into a slump in his seat like an old warehouse sagging into its foundations. Takes a shaking breath and lets it out with a sigh.

“Okay,” Steve says, rubbing at his face, at the cold sweat sitting in his hairline. Turns to face Loki, sitting crushed against Steve’s bike, cuffed hands between his bent knees. “Okay. Let’s get you outta those things.”

Steve sits on the tailgate to work the counter spell—he’s got the shakes now, too much magic and not enough sleep—and Loki stands on the tarmac, keeps watch in all directions, pale eyes sharp as a hawk’s. The cuffs are beautiful, intricate—they’re probably of Elven make, or some other Asgardian high weirdness—and the spells in them are dense enough that Steve can feel ‘em with his hands a good four inches away from the metal.

Takes maybe ten minutes of sitting, listening to the spell songs, pulling the layered tunes apart until he works out the counter. And then he’s bent over, holding the cuffs between his hands and lips pressed to the metal as he sings the counter spells in, layer after layer, until—

There’s a soft _clunk_ as the cuffs click open, and Loki hauls his hands free and shakes them out, cracks his knuckles, weaves a tangle of conjuring gestures and the muzzle falls away.

“A thousand years of blight on the hands that crafted you,” Loki rasps at the muzzle, throwing it behind him into the van. There are hard red lines carved into his cheeks, jaw, chin, neck, where the muzzle was biting into his flesh.

“Do the—” Steve throws the cuffs into the van, waves a hand at the sky, wiggles his fingers. “The veil. Eyes in the sky.”

“Indeed there are,” Ulfadhir says, starts weaving the fires of making to form the spell—Steve’s seen him use this veil, a million or so years ago, when he brought Steve the apple that saved his life. Steve listens, head cocked—loses the thread after the first ten seconds: too complex, too many moving parts. Reaches into the saddlebag to his right and pulls out a bottle of water and offers it to his Da when he’s finished weaving.

“We should move again,” Loki says, between long pulls of water—SHIELD were letting him drink once a day, when the muzzle came down for interrogation.

“Need you to get the bike down,” Steve says. “We’re ditching the van.”

“Am I the brawn of this operation?” Loki asks, putting down the bottle and climbing back into the van, shoving bags and shield to the side.

“I could shift over and do it my Cap shape, but I don’t think the shoulders of this suit would survive the transition,” Steve says, grabbing the saddlebags and standing back as Loki hooks his arms under the Harley—like it’s a five-hundred pound newborn babe—and lifts it outta the van.

Saddlebags and shield strapped onto the bike, Steve hauls his hair back from his face, knots it into a rough bun, pulls the knife from the hidden sheath at the small of his back—it’s the slender blade Loki left for him in the Tower, blued metal and gold—and pokes it through to hold everything together. Hikes the skirt of his suit right up to the tops of his thighs and climbs on the bike.

“Come on,” Steve says, kicks the engine over—rumble of the motor is visceral, bone-deep, quaking up through the bones of Steve’s ass and pelvis. Loki climbs on the back like he’s wading into a marsh, all elbows and knees, and then Steve conjures a seeming—midrange car, blue, family of four inside—and drapes it over ‘em and they pull out of the garage, back out into the flow of traffic.

Back down into the Lincoln Tunnel, back into New York.

“Are we…” Loki asks when they’re stopped at a traffic light.

“Doubling back,” Steve answers. “Doing the unexpected.”

The unexpected takes ‘em to Hell’s Kitchen, to a self-storage complex down by the river—rents out units by the week, which suits Steve just fine: another stolen ID, another seeming, another wad of cash. Taps in the access code at the gate and takes the bike down to the end of the row, last unit.

Steve flicks a hex at the security camera overhead—this place is only manned during the week, so no one’s gonna come investigate until Monday—and then climbs off the bike and drops the car-seeming. Unlocks his unit and heaves up the roller door, and Loki pushes the bike inside.

There’s a dime glued to the inside of the door, next to the handle at the bottom. Steve taps it as he slips inside—drops an anchored _don’t-notice-this_ veil over the whole unit.

Steve hauls the roller door down after them, flips the switch for the single bulb light hanging overhead. Rolls his shoulders and drops—everything, layer after layer of workings and contingency plans, the crawling tension that’s been biting into his neck and shoulders like a vice for the last fucking week and change. Shrugs off the suit jacket—it’s hot with the door down, close and muggy. Turns and—

Loki is standing at the far wall, the one Steve’s papered with maps and sketches and print offs of SHIELD security protocols over the last three days. At some point he’s wasted a little magic to straighten the creases from his coat, work the mats out of his hair, erase the red lines from where the muzzle and cuffs were biting into him. Staring up at Steve’s wall of crazy, hands clasped behind his back like he’s studying an installation in a gallery.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Steve’s Da says.

“You are a piece of _shit_ ,” Steve says, and then he’s crossing the unit—concrete like gunshots under the heels of his pumps—four strides and he’s hauling Ulfadhir in by the coat and then they’re hugging and it’s like a tackle, bruise-hard, hands like claws into the fabric of Ulfadhir’s coat and Steve’s shaking so Goddamn hard he could fall, shaking with relief and fury and exhaustion—

“I can never repay this debt,” Ulfadhir says into Steve’s hair.

“You really wanna make this about _debts_?” Steve asks, shoving his father away and turning away and looking down so Loki can’t see the wet smears on Steve’s cheeks. “Jesus, you’re such an asshole.” Palms the tears away with one hand and hauls his shoes off with the other, tossing ‘em into a corner—they don’t fit quite right. Probably guessed his shoe size wrong: he’s a shapeshifter, even his own body isn’t a reliable constant.

“Shall we compose a list of my failings, then?” Ulfadhir asks.

“ _No_ ,” Steve snarls, turning to face him again. “Why didn’t—pity’s sake, Da. You were Goddamn ensorcelled. Why didn’t you _say anything_ , you coulda—Thor would have believed you, if nobody else. You could have said _anything_ and he’d have eaten it with a _spoon_ , and you just sat there and let the world think you’re—”

“Some kind of monster,” Loki says, and there’s the whisper surge of sorcery and then his face bleeds blue, his neck, hands—pale blue, like the sky through thin ice, etched with crystalline markings like scars. His eyes are red in this form, bright as arterial blood.

“Am I supposed to be frightened?” Steve asks, and then hauls up his blouse sleeve—button pops off at the cuff—to show the blue whorls up his forearm. “Is this the point where you imagined I’d lose my shit, and you could escape with your precious dignity intact? I know—you’re a Jotun. So am I. So it’s seems like I’ve got you to thank for my seventy Goddamn years awake and screaming under the ice.”

“For—for your _what_?” Ulfadhir asks, and—it’s maybe the second time in a century that Steve’s seen his father stumble this badly: mouth fallen open, his whole face slack with confusion and then the dawning horror, so still he isn’t breathing—

“I was _awake_ ,” Steve says. “Da, I was awake the whole Goddamn _time_ ,” and the last word falls out as a sob and he’s gotta lift shaking hands to cover his face because Jesus Christ, he’s crying again, and there’s no one left alive he trusts to see him like this—and fuck, _fuck_ , he’s so _lonely_ and what is he supposed to do now, what in God’s name—

His knees are folding and there’s noises coming outta him like a dying animal, bitten off cries like a wolf in pain, and he’s not so much falling as sinking under the weight. And Ulfadhir is there, hands cold as frostbite on Steve’s belly and back, sinking with him, turning it into something kinda graceful, and then Steve’s on his knees on the concrete floor, folded over like he’s gut-shot, face pressed into his father’s thigh and howling, keening, saltwater tide of pitch-black ice-grief welling through him, belly chest throat mouth, out and through like magma through the skin of the earth, like pus lanced from a wound.

 

*******

 

After the waterworks ease off and Steve can sit back up, can string together words and—and after they’ve settled on the floor, and Ulfadhir’s woven the spell to make himself look Asgardian again, and they’re knees up and spine against spine, Steve using Ulfadhir’s shoulder like a pillow, because neither of ‘em is brave enough to look each other in the eye after everything—

“You were awake,” Ulfadhir says, and Steve can hear how tightly controlled his voice his right now: no room for any further signs of weakness, thank you very fucking much. “You were conscious, beneath the ice—how?”

“I froze,” Steve says, his voice rasping like sandpaper from keening. “I burned. But I didn’t die.”

The story spills out, urgent, like blood from the femoral artery spurting to paint the wall in wet stripes of iron and—the drifting, the borrowing, Greenland and the village. Moving around, trying to remember, trying to forget. The whales, the wolves, Heidr—

“My _sister_?” Ulfadhir asks, pulling away so he can twist around, stare at Steve’s face like he’s studying Steve for tells.

“That’s what she told me,” Steve says. “That she’d been imprisoned before you were born, so you’d never met, but—the things your face are doing right now, Da—”

“I have a _sister_?” Ulfadhir repeats, looking about as unhinged as Steve’s ever seen him, and then: “She said her name was Heidr?”

“Yeah. I mean, obviously a lie—”

“Obviously,” Ulfadhir agrees, and then demands everything, every detail, every scrap of intel Steve can remember, every flickering facial nuance—

“She was family,” Steve says at the end. “I had no reason to believe her but—but she was family. She was—” —and he thinks _baldly amoral_ , he thinks _terrifyingly powerful_ , he thinks _incapable of anything as soft as sympathy but she listened to me wail like a kicked pup anyway_ , but what comes out is: “There was a Hell of a family resemblance.”

Loki sits in silence for a long moment, gaze distant. Like he’s running calculations in his head, or rearranging the meaning and matter of his life so far to fit this new fact: an older sister, locked away and never spoken of.

“I thought I was a master of lies,” Ulfadhir says at last. “Clearly Odin is still far and away the better at falsehoods, at omission, at—a _sister_ ,” he says again, and unravels from his twist so they’re sitting back to back again. There’s a couple minutes of quiet as they settle in again—the knife in Steve’s hair is poking at the back of his skull, so he’s gotta re-angle his head, roll his neck, and then Loki breaks the silence: “And you have met Thor.”

“Your _other_ sibling? Yeah,” Steve says. “Nice hammer. He likes my shield. Haven’t had much to say to each other, though.”

“He does not know who you are?” Ulfadhir asks.

“Jesus—of _course not_ ,” Steve says. “What the—when was I supposed to start that conversation? Sometime before the aliens starting pouring through a hole in the sky, while you were running around stabbing people? After, when you were sitting in that cell like a monk on his vows and refusing to say a single Goddamn word in your own defence? Pete’s sakes—” Steve coils his stockinged legs and stands up, paces over to the wall of crazy, starts pulling it down, chunk by chunk.

Ulfadhir is silent behind him. Steve can hear his song, slow and crackling, but otherwise he coulda vanished off the face of the Earth again. Steve pulls down the map of traffic camera installations through Manhattan, breathes in, breathes out, starts again: “SHIELD watches every move I make. SHIELD would watch me take my morning shit, if I let ‘em—I am only on the outside of one of those electrified cells by the Grace of God and the skin of my teeth. No, I didn’t tell Thor I’m your kid. I can’t tell anyone.”

Loki stays quiet for a long moment, while Steve pulls down the sketches of all the faces he’s borrowed today, the head-to-toe study he did while he was designing his lady-shape, and then: “Likely, the course of wisdom,” Ulfadhir says. “Thor has not the constitution for secrets. He’d have spilled all at the first sharp turn on the road.”

Steve snorts, balls up the papers in his hand and tosses them into the corner, turns to face his father again. “Da, why didn’t you tell ‘em you’d been ensorcelled? That you’re—well, not _innocent_ , but—”

“Because I don’t have to _answer_ to some petty mortal judiciary,” Loki says, smiling crooked and bright. “Beg for forgiveness of my sins—”

“Horse _shit_ ,” Steve snaps. “Christ, you are just—an entire dumpster of garbage that is on fire—you can’t _lie to me_. Why didn’t you speak?”

Loki is silent for a long time, eyes closed and jaw working and—“I was being observed,” he says at last, low and thin. “They laid compulsion upon me with the sceptre, but they knew I might overcome that, that my mind would not lay dormant for long under its yoke, so… From the moment I stepped through the Tesseract’s gate, I had a watcher upon my shoulder, in the hopes my loyalties would endure even after the tortures stopped.”

Steve—freezes. The world goes jelly-thin under his feet, and—and _breathe, you need to remember to breathe_ , and— _Ave Maria_ , please: _Mam, I can’t, I_ —

“What happened to you?” Steve asks, for what’s gotta be the hundredth time, and the air’s so thin in his lungs it comes out a whisper.

Ulfadhir opens his eyes, meets Steve’s gaze. His mouth is a flat line, thin and bloodless-pale. “I fell into the black depths between stars,” he says. “And the Mad Titan found me there. I know not his true name, but his slaves call him Thanos.”

 

*******

 

It’s sunset and the roller door is up, just enough to let the last of the flame-orange light of the day pool over the concrete, and Steve and his father are sat in that waning light and passing a bottle of stupid-expensive gin back and forth, shins tangled together. It’s been—a long day. A long week. A long fucking century, let’s be real—and silence has fallen, still as moonlight, raw at the edges. No one has spoken for most of an hour now. Steve is okay with that.

Steve is—he’s smudging out the working sketch of the world he’s got in his mind’s eye, trying to find a way to draw in the new details.

There are aliens in outer space, countless trillions of ‘em, and they’re mostly not all that friendly.

There is a Titan called Thanos, of a species both ancient and impossibly powerful, and he wants one in two of every living thing dead.

There are glowing fucking rocks, Infinity Stones, and the smart money says there’s more’n one of them here on Earth, which means Thanos will come for them. Maybe next week, maybe in three centuries, but he’ll come and—

Steve needs to be drunker for this.

“So, what will the good Captain do now?” Loki asks, passing Steve the gin.

“I’m gonna get blitzed,” Steve says, hoisting the bottle up like he’s toasting. “And then at some point tomorrow I’ll scrape my ass up and start working on how to defend an entire planet from a Mad Titan and his innumerable Goddamn armies.”

“When Thanos comes, this world will fall,” Loki says. “You must understand—his power cannot be confronted. You can—I’ll come for you. I won’t let you die with this rock of yours.” He chews at the inside of his mouth, pulls out a golden flask from his coat and has a sip—something stronger than gin. “As I should have come for you in the ice.”

“Why didn’t you?” Steve asks, and—it’s not as raw anymore, this place in his centre where the ice stripped skin and meat from bone. Still tender, still bleeding, but—he can see now, how it might bed over one day, become scar tissue. That he might just sleep through the night sometime in the next decade.

“I sensed your despair,” Ulfadhir says. “I sensed the moment you chose death, and I—I was far afield. I came, but then—by the time I reached Midgard I couldn’t feel you anymore.”

“Saltwater,” Steve says, grim, and has another long pull of gin.

“Yes,” Ulfadhir says, and then: “Had you been cunning enough to crash a plane into fresh water—” he begins, and Steve coils a foot up and kicks him in the shoulder, and then Ulfadhir counters by snatching at his raised leg and snaring it in a hold and Steve manages to put the gin down square before the fight begins in earnest, holds and biting and hair-pulling and tickling until Steve’s breathless and collapsed on his back. The concrete is sun-warm against the length of his spine.

“I won’t go,” Steve says into the quiet, once he’s got enough breath to speak.

Silence. Steve cracks an eye open, turns his head: Loki is sitting in much the same position he started in, clothes unmarred, like a cat who’s fallen off a shelf and then gone to great trouble to pretend it never happened. He’s gazing out at the sunset, bland as porridge and sipping at the golden flask again.

“When Thanos comes, I’m not going anywhere,” Steve says, firmer now. “I’ll stay. I get that you’re older than dirt—” Loki snorts, “—and you’ve got a more universal kinda perspective, but—this is home. This world, these people. I’ll stay and I’ll fight for it, and if you think I’m not stupid enough to die for it then you clearly haven’t been paying attention.”

“Sentiment,” Loki mutters into his flask.

Steve rolls his eyes, sits up and has another swig of gin. “SHIELD, I think,” he says, staring into the side of the bottle like it might have the answers. “They’re the closest thing to a global military apparatus the Earth’s got. I’ll start there.”

“Well,” Ulfadhir says. “To futile and yet noble deaths.” He lifts the flask in a toast, and Steve grins and has a long swallow of gin. They’re quiet again for a moment, and Steve can hear the blurring in their songs, the places where the tunes overlap and create harmonies, something stronger. Something new.

“What will you do?” Steve asks.

“Avoid Midgard for a century or two,” Loki answers, and Steve has to close his eyes and take a breath, because—he’d kinda figured that was coming, after—after everything. Public Enemy Number One. And it still hurts, cold steel sliding between his ribs, because—because there’s no one else now who knows him, who he really is. Peggy, in a nursing home, dying quick and slow, and Ulfadhir, and— _fuck_. Breathe in, breathe out. Open your eyes.

“Avoid Asgard for an eon or two,” Loki continues. “Unless… I will seek out word of this sister of mine. Whatever she did, however she crossed the Allfather that he has erased all trace she ever was—the secrets she knows may be enough to finally topple Odin’s house of cards.”

“Huh,” Steve says—takes a moment to wonder if he oughta feel troubled by the idea of his father running off to overthrow a government, but then—but if secrets spilling is all it takes to turn Odin’s kingship on its head, then he can’t be much of a king. Fuck it, then.

And Heidr—his aunt might finally be freed from her prison.

Outside, the sun has disappeared behind the line of buildings that make up the horizon. There’s a smouldering line of crimson and gold to mark where it’s been, and the night is welling up like floodwater outta the cracks and crannies of the world.

“Give Heidr my love,” Steve says.

“I think not,” Loki answers.

“God, you’re such a mook,” Steve says, and drinks some more gin.

 

*******

 

When Steve wakes at midday the next day on the concrete floor he’s hungover as a son of a bitch, covered in a conjured wolfskin cloak, and alone.

He scrapes himself up, bruises and streaked eye makeup and all. Drinks some bottled water and splashes some on his face and scrapes at the layer of carpet on his tongue with his fingernails.

There’s a couple changes of clothes in the saddlebag of his bike, along with his dog tags. He shifts over to his Cap shape and dresses in the nice safe Dad clothes that SHIELD picked out for him. Puts the dog tags around his neck, so he can feel the static-warmth of his anchored shape change spell resting against his sternum.

He’s got a paramilitary organisation to infiltrate, a bunch of prickly spies to play a long fucking game with. Some kinda life to try and build outta the ashes.

He throws open the roller door and kicks the bike into gear and gets on with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my God, it's done. *has a lie down*
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has been along for this freaking rollercoaster ride. Getting your commentary and kudos and general love has been a joy, like a happy little endorphin hit square in the brainpan every time I get something new dropped in my inbox. I love you all!
> 
> Is this the end of the story? HELL TO THE NOoooo~
> 
> There are at least a couple of arcs of story still to come. Next up will cover Winter Soldier/Hydra-revealed type terrain (buckybuckybuCKYBUCKYBUCKY~!). That's the good news.
> 
> Bad news is it's gonna be an epic--something closer to the length of arc one--and I have no idea when I'll be done writing the damn thing. So, uhh, welcome back to hiatus-ville, population: all of us. *hides under the soft furnishings*
> 
> Promise I'm writing as fast as I can. But this thing is my baby, and--as you can imagine--there are some serious fucking emotional high-and-low-notes in this next arc, and I don't wanna do the whole thing a disservice by rushing it. Promise: I will never abandon this story. The obnoxious little sorcerer Steve that lives in my head would not allow it.
> 
> So much love, guys. I'll see you in the comments, and then... in arc four. <3 xoxo


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